New Worlds #173v51 (1967 07)

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Speculative Fiction July 1967 3s. 6d.

Thomas M. Disch: Camp Concentration
Ballard ■ Aldiss ■ Mac Beth • Zelazny

Thomas Woodrow Wilson

a psychological study

SIGMUND FREUD’S only study of a great con-
temporary . . . the unusual product of a collaboration with
the late American diplomat, William C. Bullitt.

24 pp half-tone, 12 line illustrations 63s

The Savage
Mind

CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS

Perhaps the masterpiece of one of
France’s most eminent contem-
porary writers ... an examination
of primitive thought which ends in
a discussion of the nature of man’s
knowledge of the past.

8pp photographs, 11 line drawings 45s

Weidenfeld

& Nicolson
congratulate
New Worlds

on its

new format

The Hidden
Order of Art

—Anton Ehrenzweig's examin-
ation of the psychology of the
artist and of artistic creation. Sir
Herbert Read wrote of his last work
‘Combines a profound knowledge
of modern psychology with an
equally profound knowledge of all
the arts' 24pp illustrations, 6 July, 63s

JEAN FRANCOIS STEINER’S extraordinary

reconstruction of the history of Treblinka — the Polish death
camp where the Jews rose in armed revolt, killing their
guards and destroying the compounds where over 800,000
men, women and children had been exterminated.

Preface by Simone de Beauvoir 36 s

Volume 51 Number 173

Contents

2 Leading Article: The Lessons of the Future
4 Thomas M. Disch: Camp Concentration
20 J. G. Ballard: The Death Module
25 John T. Sladek: 1937 A. D. !

28 Dr. Christopher Evans: Sleep, Dreams and Computers
32 P. A. Zoline: The Heat Death of the Universe
40 David Masson: Not So Certain

44 Charles Platt: Expressing the Abstract

50 George MacBeth: The Soft World Sequence

51 Roger Zelazny: In the House of the Dead

60 Books and Comment: The Hiroshima Man

64 The Authors

Illustrations: Zoline, Douthwaite, Young, Cawthorn

Editor: MICHAEL MOORCOCK. Associate Editor: LANGDON JONES
Design: CHARLES PLATT. Advertising: CLAIRE WALSH
Editorial contributions and assistance, Thomas M. Disch, Hilary Bailey.

NEW WORLDS is © 1967, published monthly at 87 Ladbroke Grove, London,

W.11, with the assistance of the Arts Council of Great Britain. Manuscripts
should be typewritten, double-spaced with wide margins on white, quarto
paper and accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. No
responsibility is taken for loss or damage to manuscripts or artwork.

Subscriptions: 48/- ($7.00) per year

Leading Article

The Lessons of the Future

i

A ll fictions tend toward either
a retrospective or a prospective
mode, towards understanding the
present either in terms of the past or
of the future. The novel in its
classic Victorian form is retrospec-
tive; the fiction that has appeared in
new worlds since its inception has
been almost invariably prospective.
The purpose of this essay is to
examine some the consequences of
these opposing (and often uncon-
scious) points of view.

The constant theme of Victorian
fiction is the interplay of genera-
tions, the contest between the young
and the old and its final resolution
in an identity. It is not entirely acci-
dental, therefore, that the Victorian
novel burdened itself with the
luggage of melodrama — wills and
codicils, creaky old houses and their
various ghosts and a neat denoue-
ment that reveals unexpected ante-
cedents (“Father!”). These elements
are a naive expression of the same
faith in the illuminating value of the
past that prompted 19th Century
painters and architects to dress
themselves up in a jumble of his-
torical “Styles” — Neo - Classic,
Gothic and What-Have-You. This
faith led a realistic novelist like
Thackeray, writing Vanity Fair in
1847, to begin his tale in 1812.
Thackeray believed in the essential
immutability of the human condi-
tion; repeatedly he points out that,
however odd the fashions of that
past day may strike us, in all im-
portant respects Society is the same
now as then. Therefore our own
condition may be best understood
by examining the condition of our
ancestors.

this position was given new
Page 2

authority by Freudian psychology,
which also looks to the past — of the
individual or the culture — for an
understanding of the present.

The past undoubtedly has its
lessons still, but now there are many
aspects of everyday life that are
rooted in the future. Our techno-
logical world is not to be explained
by history, not even by a history of
technology, if only because we do
not know how all the pieces fit to-
gether. Social institutions of im-
memorial age — church, school, the
family, the body politic, even the
structure and capabilities of the
human body — are being altered out
of recognition by forces imperfectly
understood. An organic view of the
modern age, a view as inclusive of
present facts as Anna Karenina was
inclusive of the essential facts of its
age and society — such a view is no
longer among our possibilities.
There will be no more Tolstois
again until the pace of history de-
celerates, until we can point to a
single figure and say: “Ah, the
human condition!” Presently the
human condition is changing; it
exists as a spectrum.

II

M an has changed, and is chang-
ing. The process, begun a
century ago or more, is still accelera-
ting. He has become, characteristi-
cally, an urban dweller who lives
out his life in an environment of
artifacts and artifices where he can-
not avoid a consciousness of his
own essential mutability (a theme of
much of the best speculative fiction).
The social sciences, imperfect as
they still are, indicate this much at
least: that a man’s character (and
soon, perhaps, his physical person)
is as artificial and arbitary a con-
struct as any accessory of his cul-

ture. As man’s control over a once
omnipotent nature is extended the
notion of “Nature and Nature’s
God” becomes more and more
problematical, not to say meaning-
less.

To note but a single aspect of this
vast (and generally unconscious)
process: the urban dweller is be-
coming more and more independent
of the basic rhythms of night and
day and of the seasons. It is possible
— and often necessary — to live out
a year in a metropolis like London
without significantly adjusting the
pattern of ones’ life to the great,
mythic dichotomy of winter and
summer, of death, re-birth and
harvest. Work and play are carried
on throughout the year in a tem-
perature - controlled environment.
Thanks to rapid transport and eco-
nomic internationalism, food is
available on a largely non-seasonal
basis. Christmas can be celebrated
on a tropic beach. The countryside
is no longer an inevitable back-
ground of our awareness but a
stage-set for occasional “outings”.
And London is not characteristic of
the new cities of our age. Great, and
irreversible, migrations of the new
breed of urban man are moving to-
ward the city-complexes of the sub-
tropical regions (e.g. California and
Australia) where the articulated
cycle of death and re-birth is al-
together negligible.

With the general availability of
electric power, as necessary to ur-
ban man as a water-supply, the
even profounder dichotomy of night
and day has lost much of its force,
though it may be many years before
it too is utterly abrogated.
such changes must produce pro-
portional changes in human con-
sciousness, in the sense of what it
means to be human. Christianity

and Judaism are both rooted in the
notion of the cyclical nature of life,
in its essential predictability. The
greatest of our sceptics have scarcely
dared to controvert the verities of
Ecclesiastes :

To every thing there is a season, and
time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up
that which is planted . . .

One generation passeth away, and
another generation cometh : but the

earth abideth for ever.

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth
down, and hasteth to the place where he
arose . . .

The things that hath been, it is that
which shall be; and that which is done
is that which shall be done: and there is
no new thing under the sun.

To enumerate only a few of the
elements that are, in the most dras-
tic sense, new.

The growth of a domestic tech-
nology , resulting in the diminution
of drudgery and the new “problem”
of leisure. With the advent of auto-
mation, men may find themselves in
the same position as their wives
within the foreseeable future. The
disappearance, necessarily, of the
Protestant work-ethic.

The mass media. Music, once a
concert-hall luxury or a clerical tool
(like painting and architecture) for
producing “religious” experiences,
has become an ordinary element of
consciousness. Cinema and televi-
sion provide a steady source of fan-
tasy and, more importantly, a vastly
widened spectrum of models of be-
haviour. Modern adolescents can
form their personalities on templates
other than the most immediate.

The advent of a mobile society,
due to advances in private and pub-
lic transport. A consequent frag-
mentation of the visual world and
the creation (by other influences as
well) of a new internal landscape.

As mentioned above, the prolifer-
ation of the megapolis, and its ex-
tension along superhighways. Over-
population and anomie. The neces-
sity of bureaucratic regimentation
in programmes of public welfare;
the depersonalisation and fragment-
ation of social experience.

Ill

T'Voubtless, many of the observa-
tions in the foregoing section
will seem commonplace to readers
of NEW WORLDS. A majority of the
serious speculative thinkers of our

time (not the writers of fiction usu-
ally, but such men as Buckminster
Fuller, Snow, McLuhan, and Mum-
ford) have dealt with these same
subjects more exhaustively and in
greater depth. It is our intention
only to point out that literary art
has characteristically lagged behind
in dealing with these elements of
modern life, even sometimes in
recognising them. When our best
writers have recognised them, it has
too often been to renounce them and
turn from them to a past that is
viewed as somehow more congenial
and “humanistic”. Lawrence’s prim-
itivism and Eliot’s orthodoxy repre-
sent two popular alternatives to an
acceptance of the present world.

There have been, since the time of
Kafka, many writers who have made
the effort to deal with the present
on its own terms, though they have
all suffered, to a greater or lesser
degree, from the common uncer-
tainty of our age as to what exactly
those terms are. So much of the sig-
nificance of the present lies not in
the past but in the future, not in
where we’ve been but where we’re
going. What, for instance, will be
the final outcome of the process of
automation, begun only in the last
decade? We can be certain that its
consequences will be enormous to a
degree that few of the usual “events”
of history — the changing fortunes of
monarchs and nations — have been,
but we can only speculate about
those consequences. Indeed, we
must speculate about them, for the
actual events will have been the
product, in part, of our present
speculations. Prophecies are self-
fulfilling.

ALREADY, SPECULATION (tOO often,
alas, of the most timorous variety)
has become the basis of decision-
making in politics and economics.
Manufacture could not be carried
on without the assistance of bat-
talions of computers engaged in pro-
jective calculations of seemingly
incalculable trends. The present war
in Viet Nam is presumably being
conducted for similar computer-
derived considerations, since moral-
ity and common expedience would
seem to militate against it. It is not
enough to inveigh against the advent
of technocracy; one must engage the
forces of change on their own
ground, and that ground is the
future. The life of the present day

is based more and more on our ex-
pectations of life in the future. The
past may have its lessons to teach,
but they are, like lessons in Greek,
superfluous — at best an adornment,
at worst an escape.

To illustrate the process by which
the prevision of the future can
govern present performances we can
turn to the conduct of the arts in
the past half century, especially to
music and painting, where there ob-
tains, in Harold Rosenberg’s phrase,
a “tradition of the new”. The great
painters and composers of this cen-
tury have produced their works not
for an audience of their contempor-
aries but for their posterity. Im-
mediate popular acceptance would
be considered by most serious artists
as tantamount to failure. Style suc-
ceeds style at an accelerating pace,
and this not from a mere predelic-
tion for novelty, but because artists
no longer conceive their task as
creating new works but as shaping
a new sensibility.

However, even the most prodigi-
ous artist cannot mould the charac-
ter of generations unborn; he can,
at best, second-guess the future.
With luck he will find that the new
sensibility he has shaped in the forge
of his art will coincide significantly
with that of the future; such “luck”
is the very stuff of genius.

The case of the artist is not ex-
ceptional. In the Western world, as
affluence and leisure become the
common condition, as greater num-
bers of people fail to find in religion
a satisfying world-view, it is to the
arts that we turn for the patterns by
which to form our lives. The new
heroes of our culture are singers,
actors, and sportsmen, these being
the most visible kinds of artists.

The artist is not important be-
cause he is the centre of a new cult,
but he finds himself in this position
because he is important. The con-
dition of the artist is representative
of our common condition in being
confronted with a future in which
precedent is of so little assistance.
We all stand in need of the “new
sensibility” that can enable us to
handle experiences and ideas for
which nothing in our past lives has
prepared us, and this sensibility can
be won only by an act of sustained
and informed imagination. It is to
be hoped that this magazine can
provide, in some degree, imaginative
works that will fulfil this need.

Page 3

CAMP NNCHTRATHN

thomas m. disch

*tC*EAltOK.

BukX

Page 4

May 11

Voung r.m., my Mormon guard, has brought me a
-*■ supply of paper at last. It is three months to the
day since I first asked him for some. Inexplicable, this
change of heart. Perhaps Andrea has been able to get a
bribe to him. Rigor Mortis denies it, but then he would
deny it. We talked politics, and I was able to gather
from hints R.M. let drop that President McNamara has
decided to use “tactical” nuclear weapons. Perhaps,
therefore, it is to McNamara, not to Andrea, that I am
indebted for this paper, since R.M. has been fretting
these many weeks that General Sherman, poor General
Sherman, had been denied adequate hitting power.
When, as today, R.M. is happy, his fearful smile, those
thin lips pulled back tightly across the perfect death’s-
head teeth, flickers into being at the slightest pretense
of humour. Why do all the Mormons I have known
have that same constipated smile. Is their toilet training
exceptionally severe?

This is my journal. I can be candid here. Candidly:

I could not be more miserable.

May 12

Journals, such as I have ere while attempted, have a
way of being merely exhortatory. I must remember,
here, to be circumstantial from the start, taking as
model that sublime record of prison existence, The
House of the Dead. It should be easy to be circumstan-
tial here: not since childhood has mere circumstance so
tyrannised me. The two hours each day before dinner
are spent in a Gethsemene of dread and hope. Dread
lest we be served that vile spaghetti once again. Hope
that there may be a good hunk of meat in my ladle of
stew, or an apple for dessert. Worse than “chow” is
each morning’s mad spate of scrubbing and polishing
to prepare our cells for inspection. The cells are as
bony-clean as a dream of Philip Johnson (Grand
Central Bathroom), while we, the prisoners, carry about
with us the incredible, ineradicable smell of our stale,
wasted flesh.

However: We lead here no worse a life than we
would be leading now outside these walls had we
answered our draft calls. Nasty as this prison is, there
is this advantage to it — that it will not lead so promptly,
so probably, to death. Not to mention the inestimable
advantage of righteousness.

Ah, but who is this “we”? Besides myself there are
not more than a dozen other conchies here, and we are
kept carefully apart, to prevent the possibility of esprit.
The prisoners — the real prisoners — hold us in contempt.
They have that more sustaining advantage than right-
eousness — guilt. So our isolation, my isolation becomes
even more absolute. And, I fear, my self-pity. There are
evenings when I sit here hoping that R.M. will come
by to argue with me.

Four months! And my sentence is for five years. . . .
That is the Gorgon of all my thoughts.

May 13

I must speak of Smede. Warden Smede, my arch-
enemy. Smede the arbitrary, who still refuses me library
privileges, allows me only a New Testament and a
Prayer Book. It is as though I had been left, as was so
often threatened, for my summer vacation with the
loathed Uncle Morris of my childhood (who counselled
my parents that I would “lose my eyes” by reading too
much). Bald, booming, fat with the fatness of a ruined
athlete: Smede. One might despise him only for having
such a name. Today I learned from the small portion
of my monthly letter from Andrea that the censor
(Smede?) had not blacked out that the proofs of The
Hills of Switzerland, which had been sent to me here,
were returned to the publisher with a note explaining
the rules for correspondents with prisoners. That was
three months ago. The book is in print now. It has been
reviewed ! (I suspect the publisher hurried so in the hope
of getting a little free publicity from the trial.)

The censor, naturally, removed the review Andrea
had enclosed. Agonies of vanity. For ten years I could
lay claim to no book but my wretched Doctor’s thesis
on Winstanley; now my poems are in print — and it may
be another five years before I’m allowed to see them.
May Smede’s eyes rot like potatoes in spring! May he
convulse with the Malaysian palsies!

Have tried to go on with the cycle of “Ceremonies”.
Can’t. The wells are dry, dry.

May 14

Spaghetti.

On nights like this (I write these notes after lights-
out, by the glow of the perpetual 20-watter above the
toilet bowl) I wonder if I have done the right thing in
electing to come here, if I’m not being a fool. Is this
the stuff of heroism? Or of masochism? In private life
my conscience was never so conscientious. But, damn
it, this war is wrong !

I had thought (I had convinced myself) that coming
here voluntarily would be little different from joining a
Trappist monastery, that my deprivations would be
easily bearable if freely chosen. One of my regrets as a
married man has always been that the contemplative
life, in its more rarified aspects, has been denied me. I
fancied asceticism some rare luxury, a spiritual truffle.
Ha!

On the bunk beneath mine a Mafia petit bourgeois
(snared on tax evasion charges) snores his content. Bed-
springs squeak in the visible darkness. I try to think of
Andrea. In high school Brother Wilfred counselled that
when lustful thoughts arose we should pray to the
Blessed Virgin. Perhaps it worked for him.

May 15

Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita indeed! My 35th
birthday, and a slight case of the horrors. For a few
moments this mQrning, before the metal shaving mirror,
my double, Louie II, was in the ascendant. He mocked

Page 5

and raged and muddied the banner of faith, not to men-
tion hope (already quite muddy these days), with his
scurrilities. I remembered the dismal summer of my
15th year, the summer that Louie II was in sole posses-
sion of my soul. Dismal? Actually, there was a good
deal of exhilaration in saying Non serviam, an exhilara-
tion that is still confused with my first memories of sex.

Is my present situation so very much different?
Except that now, prudently, I say Non serviam to
Caesar rather than to God.

When the chaplain came by to hear my confession I
didn’t speak of these scruples. In his innocence he
would have been apt to take the side of the cynical
Louis II. But he has learned by now not to employ the
meagre resources of his casuistry against me (another
retrograde Irish Thomist, he) and pretends to accept me
at my own moral valuation. “But beware, Louis,” he
counselled, before absolving me, “beware of intellectual
pride.” Meaning, I have always supposed, beware of
intellect.

How to distinguish between righteousness and self-
will? Between the two Louies? How, once committed,
to stop questioning ? (That is the question.) Does some-
one like R.M. have such problems? He gives the im-
pression of never having had a doubt in his whole life —
and Mormons seem to have so much more to doubt.

I am being less than charitable. Those wells, too, are
drying up.

May 16

We were sent out of prison today on a detail to cut
down and burn blighted trees. A new virus, or one of
our own, gone astray. The landscape outside the prison
is, despite the season, nearly as desolate as that within.
The war has at last devoured the reserves of our
affluence and is damaging the fibres of the everyday.

Returning, we had to file through the clinic to get
our latest inoculations. The doctor-in-charge held me
back after the others had left. A moment’s panic: had
he recognised in me the symptoms of one of the war’s
new diseases? No, it was to show me the review of The
Hills of S\ Bless, bless. Mons in New Dissent. She liked
it (hurray) though she took exception, expectably, to the
fetish poems. She also missed the references to Rilke,
which I so laboured over. Weh! While I read the review
the good doctor injected what seemed like several
thousand c.c.’s of bilgy ook into my thigh; in my happi-
ness I scarcely noticed. A review: I am rad! Must write
a letter to Mons, thanking her. Perhaps R.M. will mail
it for me. Maybe I’ll even be able to start writing again.

May 17

The two faggots with whom, grudgingly, the Mafia
and I share our cell (it is not, you will observe, theirs)
are suddenly not speaking to each other. Donny sits on
the can all day and tinkles blues. Peter broods butchly
on his bunk. Occasionally Donny would address a loud
complaint to me, concerning Peter’s promiscuities, real

or imagined. (When do they find opportunities for un-
faithfulness?) Donny, younger and black, is feminine,
even in his bitchiness, which is skilled and futile. Peter,
at thirty, is still rather handsome, though his face has a
seamy, second-hand look. They are both here on nar-
cotics charges, though it is Peter’s distinction that he
once stood trial for murder. One gets the impression
that he regrets having been acquitted. Their passion has
too much of the element of necessity about it to be
quite convincing: If you were the only boy in the world,
and I were the only other. Now who’s being bitchy?

I must say, though, that I find this sort of thing more
palatable at second-hand— in Genet, for instance. My
liberality balks before the real thing.

So there is, in this context, an advantage in being as
fat as I am. No one in his right mind would lust after
this body.

I had thought once of doing an inspirational book for
fat people, called Fifteen Famous Fatsos. Dr. Johnson,
Alfred Hitchcock, Salinger, Thomas Aquinas, Mel-
chior, Buddha, Norbert Wiener, etc.

The bedsprings are quiet tonight, but ever and again,
between the Mafia’s snores, Donny or Peter heaves a
sigh.

May 18

An hour this evening with young Rigor Mortis. The
epithet may be unjust, since R.M. is the nearest thing
to a friend that I’ve found here. He is, for all his ortho-
doxies, serious-minded, a man of good will, and our
talks are, I hope, more than exercises in rhetoric. For
my own part, I know that I feel, beyond my evangelistic
urge to bring him round, an almost desperate desire to
understand him, for it is R.M. and his like who per-
petuate this incredible war, who believe, with a sin-
cerity I cannot call into doubt, that in doing so they
perform a moral action. Or am I to accept the thesis of
our neo-Millsians (neo-Machiavellians, rather), who
maintain that the electorate is simply practised upon,
the groundlings of this world drama, that their secret
masters in the Olympus of Washington mould their
opinions as easily as they (admittedly) control the press?

I might even wish that were so: if persuasion were so
easy a task, perhaps the few voices of righteousness
might hope to have some effect. But it is a fact that not
I nor anyone I’ve known on the Committee for a Uni-
lateral Peace has ever convinced anyone of the folly and
immorality of this war who was not at heart already of
like mind, who needed no convincing but only our re-
assurances.

Perhaps Andrea is right; perhaps I should leave the
war to the politicians and the propagandists — the ex-
perts, as they are called. (Just so, Eichmann was noted
as an “expert” on the Jewish problem. After all, he
spoke Yiddish!) Abandon controversy that I may con-
secrate my talents exclusively to the Muses.

And my soul, then, to the Devil?

No, though opposition is a hopeless task, acquiescence

Page 6

would be worse. Consider Youngerman’s case: he
acquiesced, he left well enough alone, he muzzled con-
science. Did irony sustain him? Or the Muses? When
you rise to deliver a commencement address and half
the audience walks out, where is your lofty indifference
then, O poet? And his last book — so bad, so bad!

But Youngerman at least knew the meaning of his
silence. When I speak to R.M. the language itself seems
to alter: I grasp at meanings and they flit away, like
minnows in a mountain stream. Or, a better metaphor,
it is like one of those secret doors that one used to see
in horror movies. It appears to be part of the bookcase
but when the hidden spring is released it turns around
and its reverse side is a rough stone face. Must try and
develop that image.

The last word on R.M.: we do not and, I fear, we
cannot understand each other. I sometimes wonder if
the reason isn’t very simply that he’s very stupid.

May 19

The muse descends — characteristically assuming the
mortal guise of an attack of diarrhea, abetted by head-
ache. Auden observes somewhere (in the “Letter to
Lord Byron”?) how often a poet’s finer flights are due/
rumpty-tumpty-tumpty to the flu.

Though a small paradox, it should go without saying
that I have not felt so well in months. In honour of the
occasion, I will transcribe my little poem (the slightest
of lyrics, but Lord! how long it has been since the last
one):

The Silkworm Song
How can I possibly Be ready to enter
That cedarwood box Isn’t it obvious
It isn’t time
I’m in my prime

The dew is scarcely dry Behind my ears
Words cannot describe My tears
And the singing
Listen to it

The very stones are dumb With ecstasy
How can I possibly Go down
In that darkness Leaving my soul behind
Listen to the singing Butterflies
And broken pots
Come into the box
No no I may not Stop the spinning
Of butterflies and broken pots O stop

(Here the handwritten portion of Louis Sacchetti’s
journal ends. All the following passages were typed on
a different size and stock of paper. — Ed.)

June 2

T am being held prisoner! I have been kidnapped from
the prison where I by law belong and brought to a
prison in which I do not belong. Legal advice is denied
me. My protests are ignored with maddening blandness.
Not since the playground tyrannies of childhood have
the rules of the game been so utterly and arrogantly

abrogated, and I am helpless to cope. To whom shall I
complain? There is not even a chaplain in this place.
I’m told. Only God hears me now, and my guards.

In Springfield I was a prisoner for a stated reason, for
a fixed term. Here (wherever that may be) nothing is
stated, there are no rules. I demand incessantly to be
returned to Springfield, but the only answer I receive is
to have waved in my face the slip of paper that Smede
signed approving my transfer. Smede would have
approved my being gassed, if it came to that. Damn
Smede! Damn these new anonymities in their spiff,
black, unidentifying uniforms! Damn me, for having
been fool enough to place myself in a situation where
this sort of thing can happen. I should have been foxy,
like Larkin or Revere, and faked a psychosis to stay
out of the army. This is where all my fucking prissy
morality gets me: fucked!

What caps it off is this: the aged mediocrity before
whom I am regularly brought for interviews has asked
me to keep a record of my experience here. A journal.
He says he admires the way I write! I have a real gift
for words, this aged mediocrity says. Ye Gods!

For over a week I tried to behave like a proper
prisoner-of-war — name, rank and Social Security num-
ber — but it’s like the hunger strike I attempted way
back when in the Montgomery jail: people who can’t
diet four days running shouldn’t attempt hunger strikes.

So here’s your journal, aged asshole: you know what
you can do with it.

June 3

He thanked me, that’s what he did. He said, “I can
understand that you find all this very upsetting, Mr.
Sacchetti.” (Mr. Sacchetti, yet!) “Believe me, we want
to do everything in our power here at Camp Archi-
medes to make the transition easier. That’s my Func-
tion. Your Function is to observe. To observe and inter-
pret. But there’s no need to start right away. It takes
time to adjust to a new environment, I can certainly
understand that. But I think I can safely, say that once
you have made that adjustment you’ll enjoy your life
here at Camp Archimedes far more than you would
have enjoyed Springfield — or than you’ve enjoyed
Springfield in the past. I’ve read the few notes you kept
there, you know — ”

I interrupted to say that I didn’t know.

“Ah, yes. Warden Smede was kind enough to send
them along, and I read them. With great interest. In
fact, it was only at my request that you were allowed to
begin that journal. I wanted a sample of your work, so
to speak, before I had you brought here.

“You really presented a very harrowing picture of
your life in Springfield. I can honestly say I was
shocked. I can assure you, Mr. Sacchetti, that here
you’ll suffer no such harassments. And there’s none of
that disgusting hanky-panky going on here either. I
should think not! You were wasting yourself in that
prison, Mr. Sacchetti; it was no place for a man of your

Page 7

intellectual attainments. I am myself something of an
Expert in the R & D department. Not maybe what
you’d call a Genius, exactly, I wouldn’t go as far as
that, but an Expert certainly.”

“R & D?”

“Research and Development, you know. I have a
nose for talent, and in my own small way. I’m rather
well known. Inside the field. Haast is the name, Haast
with a double A.”

“Not General Haast?” I asked. “The one who took
that Pacific island?” My thought, of course, was that the
army had got me after all. (And for all I know that may
yet be the case.)

He lowered his eyes to the surface of his desk. “For-
merly, yes. But I’m rather too old now, as I believe you
have yourself pointed out, eh?” Looking up resentfully.
“Too aged ... to remain in the Army.” He pronounced
aged as a single syllable.

“Though I have preserved a few Army ties, a circle
of friends who still respect my opinion, aged as I am. I
am surprised that you associate my name with Auaui.
1944 was rather before your time.”

“But I read the book, and that came out in . . .
when? . . . 1955.” The book I referred to, as Haast
knew at once, was Fred Berrigan’s Mars in Conjunction,
a very slightly fictionalized account of the Auaui cam-
paign. Years after the book appeared I met Berrigan
at a party. A splendid, intense fellow, but he seemed to
be sweating doom. That was just a month before his
suicide. All of which is another story.

Haast glowered. “I had a nose for talent in those days
too. But talent sometimes .goes hand-in-glove with trea-
son. However, there is no point in discussing the Berri-
gan affair with you, as you’ve obviously made up your
mind.”

He returned then to the Welcome Wagon bit: I had
the run of the library; I had a fifty dollar weekly allow-
ance (!) to spend at the Canteen; movies on Tuesday
and Thursday night; coffee in the lounge; that sort of
thing. Above all, I must feel free, feel free. He refused,
as he always had before, to explain where I was, why
I was there, or when I might expect to be released or
sent back to Springfield.

“Just keep a good journal, Mr. Sacchetti. That’s all
we ask.”

“Oh, you can call me Louie, General Haast.”

“Why, thank you . . . Louie. And why don’t you call
me H.H.? All my friends do.”

“H.H.”

“Short for Humphrey Haast. But the name Humphrey
has the wrong associations in these less liberal days. As
I was saying — your journal. Why don’t you go back and
fill in where you left off, when you were brought here.
We want that journal to be as thorough-going as pos-
sible. Facts, Sacchetti — excuse me, Louie — facts'. Geni-
us, as the saying goes, is an infinite capacity for taking
pains. Write it as though you were trying to explain to
someone outside this . . . camp . . . what was happening

to you. And I want you to be brutally honest. Say what
you think. Don’t spare my feelings.”

“I’ll try not to.”

A wan smile. “But try and keep one principle in
mind always. Don’t become too, you know . . . obscure?
Remember, what we want is facts. Not. . . .” He cleared
his throat.

“Poetry?”

“Personally, you understand, I have nothing against
poetry. You’re welcome to write as much of it as you
like. In fact, do, do, by all means. You’ll find an appre-
ciative audience for poetry here. But in your journal you
must try to make sense.”

Fuck you, H.H.

(I must here interpose a childhood memory. When I
was a paperboy, at about age 13, I had a customer on
my route who was a retired Army officer. Thursday
afternoon was collection day, and old Major Youatt
would never pay up unless I came into his dim, memen-
toed living room and heard him out. There were two
things he liked to soliloquize about: women and cars.
On the first subject, his feelings were ambivalent; an
itchy curiosity about my little girlfriends alternated with
oracular warnings about V.D. Cars he liked better: his
eroticism was uncomplicated by fear. He kept pictures
of all the cars he had ever owned in his billfold, and he
would show them to me, tenderly gloating, an aged
lecher caressing the trophies of past conquests. I have
always suspected that the fact that I was 29 years old
before I learned to drive a car derived from my horror
of this man.

The point of the anecdote is this — that Haast is the
mirror-image of Youatt. They are cut with the same
template. The key word is Fitness. I imagine Haast still
does twenty push-ups in the morning and rides a few
imaginary miles on his Exercycle. The wrinkly crust of
his face is crisped to a tasty brown by a sunlamp. His
sparse and greying hair is crewcut. He carries to an ex-
treme the maniacal American credo that there is no
death.

And he is probably a garden of cancers. Isn’t that so,
H.H.?)

Later:

I have succumbed: I went to the library (of Congress?
It is vfljr!) and checked out some three dozen books,
which now grace the shelves of my room. It is a room,
not a cell at all: the door is left open day and night, if
there can be said to be a day and night in this unwin-
dowed, labyrinthine world. What the place lacks in
windows it makes up in doors: there are infinite reces-
sions of white, Alphavillean hallways, punctuated with
numbered doors, most of them locked. A regular Blue-
beard’s castle. The only doors I found open were to
rooms identical to mine, though apparently untenanted.
Am I in the vanguard? A steady purr of air-conditioners
haunts the hallways and sings me. to sleep at, as the say-
ing goes, night. Is this some deep Pellucidar? Exploring

Page 8

the empty halls, I oscillated between a muted terror and
a muted hilarity, as one does at a slightly unconvincing
but not incompetent horrorshow.

My room (you want facts, you’ll get facts):

I love it. Look at how dark

it is. One might almost call it stark.

The white paint is no longer white.

It is more like moonlight
than like white paint.

I almost faint,
looking at it.

I think it is yellow,
but I am unable to say.

H.H. isn’t going to be happy, I can tell. (Honestly,
H.H., that just happened.) For instant poetry it doesn’t
quite come up to the level of “Ozymandias”, but in all
modesty I will be satisfied with less, yes.

My room (let’s try it again):

Off-white (there’s the difference, in brief, between fact
and poesy); original abstract oil paintings on these off-
white walls, in the impeccable corporate taste of the
New York Hilton, paintings as neutral in content as
blank walls or Rorschach cards; expensive Danish-Mod
slabs of cherrywood tricked out here and there with
cheery, striped, cubical cushions; an Acrilan carpet in
off -ochre; the supreme luxury of wasted space and
empty corners. I would estimate that I have 500 square
feet of floor space. The bed is in its own little el and
can be screened from the main body of the room by
vapid, flowery drapes. There is a feeling that all four
off-white walls are of one-way glass, that every drooping
milky globe of light masks a microphone.

What gives?

A question that is on the tip of every guinea pig’s
tongue.

The man who stocks the library has more exquisite
taste than the interior decorator. For: there was not one,
not two, but three copies of The Hills of Switzerland on
the shelf. Even, so help me God, a copy of Gerald Win-
si anley, Puritan Utopist. I read Hills through and was
pleased to find no misprints, though the fetish poems
had been put in the wrong order.

Still later:

I have been trying to read. I take up a book, but after
a few paragraphs it loses my interest. One after another,
I set aside Palgrave, Huizinga, Lowell, Wilenski, a
chemistry text, Pascal’s Provincial Letters and Time
Magazine. (We are, as I suspected, using tactical nuclear
weapons now; two students were killed in a protest-riot
in Omaha.) I haven’t felt a like restlessness since my
sophomore year at Bard, when I changed my major
three times in one semester.

The giddiness infects my whole body; there is a
hollowness in my chest, a dryness in my throat, an al-
together inappropriate inclination to laughter.

I mean, what’s so funny?

June 4

A soberer morning-after.

As Haast requests, I will recount the events of the
interim. May they be used in evidence against him.

The day after “The Silkworm Song” — that would be
May 20 — I was still sick and had remained in the cell
while Donny and Peter (already reconciled) and the
Mafia were out on a work detail. I was summoned to
Smede’s office to receive at his hand the package con-
taining my personal effects. He made me check it item
for item against the inventory that had been drawn up
the day I’d entered prison. Searing blasts of hope, as I
imagined that some miracle of public protest of judicial
conscience had set me free. Smede shook my hand, and,
delirious, I thanked him. Tears in my eyes. The son of
a bitch must have been enjoying himself.

He handed me over then, with an envelope the same
sickly yellow colour as my prisoned flesh (this was the
Sacchetti Dossier, surely) to two guards in black uni-
forms, trimmed in silver, very Germanic and, as we
used to say, tuff. Calf-high boots, leather straps that
formed a veritable harness, mirror-sunglasses, the works:
Peter would have groaned with envy, Donny with desire.
They said not a word but went straight to their work.
Handcuffs. A limousine with curtains. I sat between
them and asked questions of their stope faces and
shielded eyes. An airplane. Sedation. And so, by a route
unmarked even by breadcrumbs, to my comfy little cell
in Camp Archimedes, where the witch feeds me very
good meals. (I have only to ring a bell for room service.)

I arrived here. I’m told, the 22nd. First interview with
H.H. the next day. Warm reassurances and obstinate
mystifications. As noted, I remained non-communicative
until the 2nd of June. Those nine days passed in an
Empyrean of paranoia, but that, like all passions, ebbed,
diminished to an ordinary humdrum horror, thence to
an uneasy curiosity. Shall I confess that there is a kind
of pleasure to be had in the situation, that a strange
castle is rather more interesting than the same old dun-
geon all the time?

But confess it to whom? To H.H.? To Louie II,
whom I must confront in the mirror almost every day
now?

No, I shall pretend that this journal is just for me, my
journal. If Haast wants a copy, Haast will have to
supply me with carbon paper.

Later:

I wonder, reading over “The Silkworm Song”, if the
fifth line is quite right. I want an effect of disingenuous
pathos; perhaps I’ve achieved no more than a cliche.

June 5

Haast informs me, by Inter-Office Memo, that the
electric typewriter I use is part of a Master-Slave hook-
up that automatically produces, in another room,
second, third and fourth impressions of everything I
type. H.H. gets his Journal fresh off the press — and
think of all the money he saves not having to supply me

Page 9

with carbon paper.

Today, the first evidence that there is that here which
merits chronicling:

On the way to the library to get tapes to play on my
hi-fi (a B&O, no less) I encountered one of the spirits
inhabiting this circle of my new hell, the first circle, if
I am to go through them in a proper, Dantean order —
Limbo — and he, stretching the analogy a bit farther,
would be the Homer of this dark glade.

Dark it was, for the fluorescent fixtures had been re-
moved from this length of corridor, and as in a glade a
constant and chill wind swept through the pure Eucli-
dean space, some anomaly in the ventilating system, I
suppose. He stood there blocking my way, his face
buried in his hands, cornsilk-white hair twined about the
nervous fingers, swaying and, I think, whispering to
himself. I approached quite close, but he did not rouse
from his meditation, so I spoke aloud: “Hello there.”

And when even this drew no response, I ventured
further. “I’m new here. I was a prisoner at Springfield, a
conchy. I’ve been brought here illegally. Though God
knows to what purpose.”

He took his hands from his face and looked at me,
squint-eyed, through the tangled hair. A broad, young
face, Slavic and ingenuous — like one of the second-
string heroes in an Eisenstein epic. The broad lips
broadened in a chill, unconvinced smile, like a stage
moonrise. He lifted his right hand and touched the
centre of my chest with three fingers, as though to
assure himself of my corporeality. Assured, the smile
became more convinced.

“Do you know/’ I asked urgently, “where we are? Or
what’s to be done with us?”

The pale eyes looked from side to side — in confusion
or fear, I could not tell.

“What city? What state?”

Again, that wintry smile of recognition, as my words
bridged the long distance to his understanding. “Well,
the nearest any of us can tell, we’re in the mountain
states. Because of Time, you know.” He pointed to the
magazine in my hand. He spoke in the most nasal of
mid-western voices, in an accent unmodified by educa-
tion or travel. He was in speech as in looks a model
Iowa farmboy.

“Because of Time?” I asked, somewhat confused. I
looked at the face on the cover (General Phee Phi Pho
Phum of North Malaysia, or some other yellow peril),
as though he might explain.

“It’s a regional edition. Time comes out in different
regional editions. For advertising purposes. And we get
the mountain states edition. The mountain states are
Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado. . . .” He named their
names as though twanging chords on a guitar.

“Ah! Yes, I understand now. Slow of me.”

He heaved a deep sigh.

I held out my hand, which he regarded with undis-
guised reluctance. (There are parts of the country, the
West Coast especially, where because of the germ war-

fare the handshake is no longer considered good form.)
“The name’s Sacchetti. Louis Sacchetti.”

“Ah! Ah yes!” He took hold of my hand convulsively.
“Mordecai said you were coming. I’m so glad to meet
you. I can’t express—” He broke off, blushing deeply,
and pulled his hand out of mine. “Wagner,” he mum-
bled, as if an afterthought. “George Wagner.” Then,
with a certain bitterness, “But you would never have
heard of me.”

I’ve encountered this particular form of introduction
so often at readings or symposia, from other little-maga-
zine writers or teaching assistants, smaller fry even than
myself, that my response was almost automatic: “No,
I’m afraid I haven’t, George. Sorry to say. I’m surprised,
as a matter of fact, that you’ve heard of me."

George chuckled. “He’s surprised . . .” he drawled,
. . as a matter of fact . . . that I’ve heard of him\"
Which was no little disconcerting.

George closed his eyes. “Excuse me,” he said, almost
whispering. “The light. The light is too bright.”

“This Mordecai that you mentioned. . .?”

“I like to come here because of the wind. I can
breathe again. Breathing the wind. Here.” Or perhaps
what he said was, “Hear”, for he went on: “If you’re
very quiet you can hear their voices.”

It was indeed very quiet, but the only sound was the
seashell roaring of the air-conditioners, the gloomy
blasts of chill air through the chambered corridor.
“Whose voices?” I asked with a certain trepidation.
George furrowed his white brows. “Why, the angels,
of course.”

Mad, I thought — and then realized that George had
been quoting my own poem to me — the paraphrase-
cum-parody I’d done of the Duino Elegies. That George,
this ingenuous Iowa boy, should so lightly toss off a line
from one of my uncollected poems was even more dis-
concerting than the simpler supposition that he was off
his nut. “You’ve read that poem?” I asked.

George nodded and the tangle of cornsilk crept down
over pale eyes, as though from shyness.

“It isn’t a very good poem.”

“No, I suppose not.” George’s hands, which had till
now been preoccupied with each othef behind his back,
began to creep back up to George’s face. They reached
up to push the drooping hair from his eyes, then stayed
atop his head, as though snared. “But it’s true anyhow
. . . you can hear their voices. Voices of silence. Or the
breath, it’s the same thing. Mordecai says that breath is
poetry too.” The hands slowly came down in front of
the pale eyes.

“Mordecai?” I repeated, with some urgency. I could
not then, I still cannot, shake off the feeling that I’ve
heard that name elsewhere, elsewhen.

But it was like speaking to someone in a boat that the
current was ineluctably bearing away. George shud-
dered. “Go away,” he whispered. “Please.”

But I did not, not at once, go away. I stood there
before him, though he seemed to have become quite ob-

Page 10

livious of me. Gently he rocked back and forth, from
his heels to the balls of his feet, then back on his heels.
His fine hair stirred in the steady hissing exhalation
from the ventilator.

He spoke aloud to himself, but I could only catch a
little of what he said. “Linkages of light, corridors, stair-
ways. . . .” The words had a familiar ring, but I could
not place them. “Spaces of being and shields of bliss.”

Abruptly he took his hands from his face and stared
at me. “Are you still there?” he asked.

And though the answer was self-evident, I said that,
yes, I was still here.

In the semi-darkness of the corridor his pupils had
dilated, and it was this perhaps that made him seem so
sad. Again he laid three fingers on my chest. “Beauty,”
he said solemnly, “is nothing but the beginning of a
terror that we are able barely to endure.” And with
those words George Wagner heaved up the entirety of a
considerable breakfast into that pure Euclidean space.
Almost at once the guards were about us, a brood of
black mother-hens, giving George a mouth rinse, mop-
ping up and conducting us our separate ways. They
gave me something to drink too. A tranquillizer, I sus-
pect; else, I should not have the presence of mind yet to
document the encounter.

What a strange fellow he was though! A farmboy
quoting Rilke. Farmboys might recite Whittier perhaps,
or even Carl Sandburg. But the Duineser Elegienl

June 6

room 34 :

solid stainless steel numbers pasted to a prosaic blond-
wood door, and beneath in white letters graven on a
rectangle of black plastic (like those that show a bank
teller’s name on one side and next window please on
the other):

DR. A. BUSK.

My guards led me within and entrusted me to the severe
tutelage of the two chairs, which, webs of black leather
slung from bands of chromed steel, were but the ab-
stractions — an attar, as it were — of the guards them-
selves. Chairs by Harley-Davidson. Hard-edge paintings
(chosen for the pleasures of such chairs) flattened them-
selves against the walls, yearning to become invisible.

Dr. A. Busk strides into the room and threatens me
with her hand. Am I to shake it? No, she is only mo-
tioning me to be seated. I am seated, she is seated,
crossing her legs, snick-snack, pulling at the hem of her
skirt, smiling. It is a credible if not a kindly smile, a
little too thin, too crisp. The high, clear brow and reti-
cent eyebrows of an Elizabethan noblewoman. Forty
years old? More likely forty-five.

“Excuse me if I do not offer you my hand, Mr.
Sacchetti, but we’ll get on much better if we dispense
with that kind of hypocrisy from the beginning. It’s not
as though you were spending your vacation here, is it?
You are a prisoner, and lam... what? I am the prison.
That’s the beginning of an honest, if not altogether

pleasant relationship.”

“By honest do you mean that I shall be allowed to
insult you as well?”

“With impunity, Mr. Sacchetti. Tit for tat. Either here
or at your leisure, in your journal. I am sent the second
copy, so you can be certain that anything unpleasant
you have to say will not be in vain.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Meanwhile, there are a few things you should know
about what we are doing here. Yesterday you met young
Wagner, but in your journal you pointedly refrained
from any kind of speculation concerning his rather re-
markable behaviour. Though you certainly must have
given the matter some thought.”

“I certainly must have.”

Dr. A. Busk pursed her lips and tapped a ragged
fingernail on the envelope clipped to her clipboard —
the Sacchetti Dossier again. “Do let’s be candid, Mr.
Sacchetti. It must have occurred to you that young
George’s behaviour was not wholly consistent, and you
must have associated these inconsistencies with certain
remarks concerning your role here that my colleague,
Mr. Haast, has let drop. Not, I may point out, acciden-
tally. You must, in short, have come to suspect that
young George is the subject — one of the subjects — in an
experimental programme that is being carried out
here?” She raised a reticent, questioning eyebrow. I
nodded.

“You could not have guessed — and perhaps it will
ease your mind to learn? — that young George is here
voluntarily. You see, he deserted the Army while on
furlough in Taipei. The usual sordid sort of thing with
a soldier and a prostitute. Of course he was found and
court-martialled. His sentence was five years imprison-
ment, a mild sentence, you must admit. Had we been
officially at war, he might have been shot. Yes, quite
likely.”

Then it is the Army that’s kidnapped me?”

“Not exactly. Camp Archimedes is operated under a
grant from a private foundation, though to preserve the
necessary secrecy we are quite autonomous. Only one
officer of the foundation knows the exact nature of our
research. For the rest of them — and for the Army — we
come under that all-inclusive category of weapons de-
velopment. A good many of the personnel — most of the
guards, and I myself — have been borrowed, as it were,
from the Armed Services.”

With that knowledge, all her attributes — the scrubbed
face, the stiff manner, the defeminized voice — coalesced
into a viable image: “You’re a WAC!”

In reply she made an ironic salute. “So, as I was say-
ing, poor George went to the brig, and he wasn’t happy
there. He could not, as my colleague, Mr. Haast, is wont
to say, adjust to a brig environment. When the oppor-
tunity came for him to volunteer for Camp Archimedes
he leaped at it. After all, most experiments these days
are in the field of immunology. Some of the new
diseases are extremely unpleasant. That’s young

Page 1 1

George’s story. The other subjects you will meet have
analogous backgrounds.”

“This subject doesn’t.”

“You are not, precisely, a subject. But to understand
just why you’ve been brought here, you must first under-
stand the purpose of the experiment. It is an investiga-
tion of learning processes. I need not explain to you the
fundamental importance of education with respect to the
national defence effort. Ultimately it is intelligence that
is a nation’s most vital resource, and education can be
seen as the process of maximising intelligence. How-
ever, as such it is almost invariably a failure, since this
primary purpose is sacrificed to the purpose of socializa-
tion. When intelligence is maximized, it is almost always
at the expense of the socialization process — I might cite
your own case in this respect — and so, from society’s
point of view, little has been gained. A cruel dilemma.”

“It is perhaps the chief mission of the science of
psychology to resolve this dilemma— to maximize intel-
ligence without vitiating its social utility. I hope that’s
clear?”

“Cicero himself had not so pure a Latin style.”

La Busk crinkled her high, unpencilled brows, not
getting the point, then, deciding it wasn’t worth her
while to pursue it, mere a-social levity, unfurrowed and
continued:

“And therefore we are exploring certain new educa-
tional techniques here, techniques of adult education. In
an adult the socializing process has been completed.
Few subjects exhibit marked character development
after twenty-five. Therefore, if the process of intelli-
gence-maximization can be initiated then — if the stulti-
fied creative faculties can be reawakened, so to speak —
then we may begin to exploit that precious resource, the
mind, as it has never been exploited before.

“Unhappily we have been given what amounts to de-
fective materials to work with. When one must rely
upon Army brigs, for experimental subjects, one intro-
duces a systematic error into the work, since for such
people the process of socialization was clearly un-
successful. And to be quite candid, it’s my opinion that
this error in selection is already having its unhappy
consequences. I hope you note that down in your
journal.”

I assured her that I would. I couldn’t refrain then —
little as I wanted to give her the satisfaction of seeing
how much she had piqued my curiosity — from asking:
“By new educational techniques, am I to assume you
mean drugs?”

“Ah ha. Then you have been giving the matter some
thought. Yes, certainly, drugs. Though not in the sense
you perhaps suppose. There are, as any college fresh-
man these days knows, drugs available from extralegal
sources that can temporarily assist memory retention by
as much as two hundred per cent, or speed up other
learning processes proportionally. But the learning
curves flatten out with continued use of such drugs, and
one soon reaches the point of diminishing returns, and

finally no returns at all. There are such drugs, and there
are others too, such as LSD, which can produce a
specious sense of omniscience. I needn’t tell you of such
drugs though, need I, Mr. Sacchetti?”

“Is that down on my profile? I must say you’ve been
thorough.”

“Oh, there’s very little we don’t know about you, sir.
Before you were brought here you may be sure we
examined every dirty little cranny of your past. It
wouldn’t do to bring just any conchy here, you know.
We had to be certain you were harmless. We know you
inside and out. Your schools, relatives, friends, what
you’ve read, where you’ve been. We know what room
you occupied in every hotel you stayed at in Switzerland
and Germany when you had your Fulbright. We know
every girl you dated at Bard and afterward, and just
how far you got with each. And it hasn’t been a very
good showing, I must say. We know, in considerable
detail, just how much you’ve earned during the last fif-
teen years, and how you’ve spent it. Any time the
government cares to, it can send you right back to
Springfield on tax evasion charges. We have the records
from your two years of psychotherapy.”

“And have you bugged the confessionals as well?”
“Only since you came to Springfield. That’s how we
found out about your wife’s abortion and your nasty
little affair with that Miss Webb.”

“Good-looking though, wasn’t she?”

“If you like weak types. But to get back to business:
your task here is quite simple. You will be allowed to
circulate among the subjects, to speak with them, to
share, as far as possible, their day-to-day life. And to
report, in brief compass, the matters with which they
are preoccupied, their amusements and your own estima-
tion of the . . . what shall I say? ... of the intellectual
climate here. I suspect you will enjoy the work.”
“Perhaps. But why me?”

“One of the subjects recommended you. Of the
various candidates we considered, you seemed most apt
for the work — and certainly the most available. In all
honesty it must be said that we have been having . . .
communications problems with the subjects. And it was
their ringleader — Mordecai Washington his name is —
who suggested that you be brought here to act as a sort
of go-between, an interpreter. Do you remember Mor-
decai? He went to the same high school you did for
one year— ’55.”

“Central High School? The name seems vaguely
familiar, but I can’t place it. I may have heard it read
off of some attendance sheet, but he certainly wasn’t a
friend. I never had so many that I’m apt to forget their
names.”

“You’ll have ample opportunity to repair that omis-
sion here then. Are there any more questions?”

“Yes. What does the A. stand for?”

She looked blank.

“In Dr. A. Busk,” I clarified.

“Oh, that. It stands for Aimde.”

Page 12

“And which private foundation is supplying the cash
for this place?”

“I could tell you, but really, Mr. Sacchetti, don’t you
think you’d be better off not knowing? The subjects
have been instructed that there are certain things which,
for your own sake, it would be better that they not
discuss with you. Because you will, I presume, want to
leave here sometime, won’t you?”

Dr. Aimee Busk uncrossed her legs with a slither of
nylon and stood up. “The guards will be here directly
to take you back upstairs. I shall see you again next
week at the latest. In the meantime, feel free to come
and ask me any question that you’re certain you want to
have the answers to. Good-day, Mr. Sacchetti.” With
three brisk scissor-steps she left the room. Having
scored all the points for that round.

Later:

Within an hour after I’d typed this journal entry, a
note came from H.H. “She’s thirty-seven. H.H.”

Interdepartmental rivalries? (Don’t answer that ques-
tion.)

June 7

T had thought my migraines, being so clearly psycho-
-*• somatic, had been exorcised by my psychotherapy,
but they returned last night with a vengeance. Where
one had been there now are seven. Perhaps La Busk,
being an initiate to the mysteries, was able to work
some counter-magic to Dr. Mieris’s cure; perhaps it was
simply that I stayed^up past two o’clock in a fit of
scribbling. I don’t yet have enough distance from it to
judge whether the poem was worth such a price. Though
who knows? Perhaps it was the migraine brought on the
poem.

So much for the life of the mind; the notable event of
the day was the visitation, shortly after breakfast (at
noon) of the fabled Mordecai Washington. He came
unannounced by any guard, knocked but didn’t wait to
be invited in. “May I?” he asked, having already done
so.

Even face to face, even with his voice, his loud voice,
thudding against my migraine, I did not recognise him
as my supposed high school friend, as anyone.

A first impression: he is not good-looking. I’ll admit
my standards of beauty are ethnocentric, but I don’t
think many Negroes would find Mordecai Washington
good-looking either. Very dark he is, well-nigh purplish.
Long in the face, with a jaw that juts and blub lips
(flattened against the plane of the face, however, rather
than protruding; vertical lips, one might call them), a
minimal nose, and tousley neo-Maori hair. A chest that
would a century past have been called consumptive,
negligible shoulders, bandy legs, clodhopper feet. A
gravelly rasp of a voice, like Punch in a puppet show.
Handsome eyes, however (though it’s always easy to
concede that to ugly people).

Even so, I will insist that he has extraordinary eyes.

at once moist and lively, suggesting depths but never
revealing them, oxymoronal eyes.

“No, stay where you are,” he insisted, when I began
to climb out of bed. He dragged a chair across the room
to my bedside. “What are you reading? Ah, a picture
book. You’ve been here all this while, and no one told
me. I found out from George. It’s a pity, but then I’ve
been temporarily. . . .” He waved a hand above his
head vaguely. (His hands, like his feet, were dispropor-
tionately big. Fingers splayed at the tips like a work-
man’s, but quick, almost fluttery. His gestures tend to
be over-dramatic, as though to compensate for his dead-
pan face.) . . defunct. Inert. Moribund. Comatose. But
that’s all over now. And you’re here. I’m glad. I am.
Mordecai Washington.”

Gravely, he offered me his hand. I could not help
sensing a certain irony in this gesture, as though in
accepting it I were serving as his straight-man.

He laughed, shrill parrot-laughter pitched two octaves
higher than his speaking voice. It was as though another
person did his laughing for him. “Oh, you can touch it.
I won’t give you any god-damn germs. Not that way,
boss.”

“It hadn’t even occurred to me . . . Mordecai.” (I
have never been able to use first names with strangers
readily.)

“Oh, I didn’t expect you’d remember me. Don’t feel
bad on that account. And you don’t have to tutoyer
me, yet.” This, in abysmal French. “But I’ve remem-
bered you. Eidetically, the way you remember a par-
ticular moment from a horror movie. Psycho, for in-
stance? Remember Psychol ”

“Yes, the bathtub sequence. Was I like Tony Perkins
in those days? God forbid.”

“You were terrifying enough in your own way. To
me. We were in the same homeroom. Miss Squinlin,
remember her?”

“Miss Squinlin! Yes, I hated that woman.”

“Fat old red-faced cunt— I hated her a hell of a lot
more than you ever did, brother. I had her for English
10-C. Silas Marner, Julius Caesar > Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner. Jesus Christ, I almost stopped speak-
ing the fucking language, she made me hate it so.”

“You still haven’t explained what I had in common
with Psycho .”

“Well, let’s say Donovan s Brain instead. A brain in
a glass tank. The octopus-intellect sniffing off after
scholarships, knowing all the answers, devouring all the
shit that the Squinlins could shovel in. The cerebrum
as Cerberus.” He spoiled the cleverness of this by mis-
pronouncing both words.

“And when you wanted to, you could put down
people like old Squinlin. Me, I just had to sit there and
take their shit. I knew it was shit, but what could I do?
They had me coming and going.

“The thing about you that’s really stuck in my mind
—hell, it changed my life!— was one day in the spring
of ’55, you and a couple of those Jewish broads you

Page 13

hung around with were staying after school yakking
away about whether or not there was a Gaud. That’s
what you called him — Gaud. You had a real fakey
accent then — from seeing too many Laurence Olivier
movies. I’ll bet. I was sitting at the back of the room
on detention. Sullen and invisible, as was my way.
Does any of it come back?”

“Not that particular day. I talked a lot about Gaud
that year. I had just discovered the Enlightenment, as
it’s called. I remember the two girls though. Barbara — •
and who was the other one?”

“Ruth.”

“What a fearful memory you have.”

“The better to eat you with, my darling. Anyhow, to
get back — the two broads would bring up those hoary
arguments about the universe is like a watch, and you
can’t have a watch without a watchmaker. Or the First
Cause, that no other Cause Causes. Till that day I’d
never even heard the watchmaker bit, and when they
came out with it, I thought, ‘Now, that’ll stop old Dono-
van’s Brain.’ But not a bit of it — you just tore their
sappy syllogisms — ” Another foul mispronunciation.
“ — to pieces. They never got the message, they just kept
coming on with the same old crap — but I did. You
toppled me right out of that old-time religion.”

“I’m sorry, Mordecai. Truly I am. One never realised
how many other lives we can poison with what we think
is our own error. I don’t know how — ”

“Sorry? Baby, I was thanking you. It may seem a
strange way to do it, having you hijacked to this hole-
in-the-ground, but it’s a better life you’ll lead here than
you led in Springfield. Haast showed the journal you
were keeping there. You’re well out of it. But I’ll admit
it wasn’t only altruism made me ask Haast to bring you
here. It was my big chance to meet a first-class, bona-
fide, published poet. You really went the whole way,
didn’t you, Sacchetti?” Impossible to sort out the feel-
ings he mingled in that one question: admiration, con-
tempt, envy and — which affected nearly everything Mor-
decai said to me — a sort of haughty mirth.

“I take it that you’ve read The Hills of Switzerland ?”
I returned. Trust a writer’s vanity to take the first
opportunity to sneak that in!

Mordecai shrugged his negligible shoulders. “Yeah. I
read it.”

“Then you know that I’ve outgrown the callow
materialism of those days. God exists quite indepen-
dently of Aquinas. Faith is more than a mastery of
syllogisms.”

“Fuck faith, and fuck your epigrams. You’re not my
Big Brother any more. I’m two years your senior,
friend. And as for your latter-day piety, I had you
brought here despite that, and despite some stinking
awful poetry too.”

What could I do but flinch?

Mordecai smiled, his anger bevanished as soon as
expressed. “There were some stinking good poems too.
George liked the book as a whole better than I did.

and George knows more about such things. For one
thing, he’s been here longer. What’d you think of him?”
“Of George? He was . . . very intense. I’m afraid I
wasn’t quite prepared for so much all at once. I’m
afraid I’m still not. You’re pretty fast and loose down
here, especially after the total vacuum of Springfield.”
“Like hell. What’s your I.Q. anyhow?”

“Does it make sense, at my age, to talk about I.Q.s?
In ’57 I scored 160 on one test, but I don’t know how
far along the standard curve that would take me. But
now what difference does a printed test make? It’s a
question entirely of what you do with your intelligence.”
“I know — ain’t it a bitch?” Lightly as he tossed this
off, I felt that I had for the first time in our talk touched
a theme that Mordecai regarded with any sort of
seriousness.

“What are you doing, Mordecai? Here, in this place.
And what is this place? What are Haast and Busk try-
ing to get out of you people?”

“This is hell, Sacchetti, didn’t you know? Or its ante-
chamber. They’re trying to buy our souls up so they can
use our bodies for sausages.”

“They told you that I shouldn’t know anything about
it — is that it?”

Mordecai faced away from me and walked across the
room to the bookshelf. “We’re geese, and into our
gullets Haast and Busk are stuffing western culture.
Science, art, philosophy, whatever can be crammed in.
And still —

I am not full, I am not full.

My stomach has been flushed and flushed,
and yet I cannot hold
my food, I cannot touch Oh!

I am not full.”

It was my own poem that Mordecai had quoted. My
reaction wavered between the flattery I felt at his having
singled out just that passage to memorise (for it is one
I am most proud of) and a pity for the poignance of
what he had said, not less poignant for my having said
it first. I made no reply, asked no more questions.

Mordecai dropped leadenly onto the couch. “This
room is a fucking mess, Sacchetti. All our rooms were
like this at the start, but you don’t have to put up with
it. Tell Haast you want something classier. Say the cur-
tains interfere with your brain waves. We’ve got carte
blanche here for things like interior decoration — as
you’ll see. So take advantage of it.”

“Compared to Springfield this seems quite elegant.
For that matter, compared to anywhere I’ve ever lived,
barring a single day at the Ritz.”

“Yeah, poets don’t make so much money, do they?
I’ll bet I was a lot better off than you — before I got
drafted. The motherfuckers! That was a big mistake,
getting drafted.”

“You arrived at Camp Archimedes the same way
George did, via the brig?”

“Yeah. Assaulting an officer. The son of a bitch kept
asking for it. They all keep asking for it, but they never

Page 14

get it. Well, that son of a bitch did. I knocked the
mother’s teeth out, two of them. Bad scene. The brig
was a worse scene — they’re really down on you after a
thing like that. So I volunteered. That was six, seven
months back. Sometimes I think maybe it wasn’t such
a big mistake. I’ll say this for the stuff they gave us —
it beats acid. With acid you think you know everything;
with this, you goddam well do. But it isn’t so often I
can get as high as all that. Most of the time it’s a pain.
Like H.H. says — ‘Genius is an infinite capacity for
pain’.”

I laughed, as much from sheer dizziness at the speed
and shifts of his rhetoric as in appreciation of the mot.
“But it was a mistake. I was better off dumb.”
“Dumb? It doesn’t sound like that was ever exactly
your condition.”

“I sure as hell never had no hundred-and-sixty I.Q.
Not this mother.”

“Oh, but those tests are gimmicked for middle-class
WASPs like me. Or I suppose I should say WASCs.
Measuring intelligence isn’t as simple as taking a blood
sample.”

“Thanks for saying so, but the truth is I was a dumb
son of a bitch. And even more ignorant than dumb.
Everything that I know now, the way I’m talking with
you — it’s all on account of the Pa — on account of the
stuff they gave me.”

“All of it? No.”

“Fucking all of it!” He laughed, a calmer laugh than
at first. “It’s gratifying to talk with you, Sacchetti. You
flinch at my every obscenity.”

“Do I! It’s that middle-class upbringing, I suppose.
I’m well used to the Anglo-Saxon words in print, but
somehow the spoken word. . . . It’s a reflex.”

“That picture book you’re looking at — have you read
the text that goes with it?”

I had been browsing through the second volume of
Wilenski’s Flemish Painters, which contains the plates.
Volume One is all text. “I started to, but I got bogged
down. I haven’t settled down enough to be able to con-
centrate on anything.”

Mordecai’s reaction to this seemed unduly grave. He
said nothing in response, however, but after a pause
continued his first train of thought. “There’s a passage
in there that’s terrific. Can I read it to you?” He’d al-
ready taken Volume One down from the shelf. “It’s
about Hugo van der Goes. You know about him?”
“Only that he was one of the earliest Flemish
painters. I don’t think I’ve seen anything of his though.”
“You couldn’t have. None of it survived. Nothing that
he signed, at any rate. The story goes that around 1470
he went mad, raved about being damned and the devil
was going to get him and all that. He was already living
in this monastery near Brussels at the time, and the
brothers would play music to try and calm him, like
David with Saul. One of the boys there wrote an account
of his madness — it’s all worth reading — but the part of
it I really liked. . . . Here, let me read it to you:

“ \ . . Brother Hugo from inflaming of his imaginative
powers was disposed to daydreaming fantasies and hal-
lucinations and suffered in consequence an illness of the
brain. For there is, I am told, a small delicate organ,
near the brain, which is controlled by the creative and
imaginative powers; if our imagination is too vivid or
our fantasy too abundant, this little organ is affected,
and if it is strained to the breaking point madness or
frenzy results. If we are to avoid falling into this
irremediable . . .”’

Mordecai faltered pronouncing this word.

“ ‘. . . danger, we must limit our fantasy, our imagina-
tions and our suspicions and exclude all other vain and
useless thoughts which may excite our brains. We are
all but men; and the disaster that fell upon our Brother
as a result of his fantasies and hallucinations, could it
not also fall on us?’

“Isn’t that great? I can just imagine the old bastard,
the satisfaction he got writing it down: ‘I told you so,
Hugo! Didn’t I always say that all that painting was
dangerousT Why do you suppose he did go mad,
though?”

“Anyone can go mad; it’s not the prerogative of
painters. Or poets.”

“Yeah, I suppose when you come right down to it,
everybody’s crazy. My folks were sure enough crazy.
Mammy — that’s what we called her, so help me! —
Mammy was crazy with the Holy Ghost, and the old
man was crazy without it. Both my brothers were
junkies, so that makes them crazy. Crazy and crazy and
crazy and crazy.”

“Is something wrong?” I asked, rising from bed and
going toward Mordecai, who had become increasingly
agitated during this speech, until at last, trembling, eyes
pressed tightly closed, one hand upon his heart, his
speech degenerated into a mere static of choked breath.
The heavy book dropped from his left hand to the floor,
and at its impact he opened his eyes. “I’ll be . . . all
right if I ... sit down a minute. A little dizzy.”

I helped him back to the sofa and, lacking a better
remedy, brought him a glass of water, which he drank
gratefully. His hands, holding the glass, still trembled.

“And yet, you know . . .” he resumed quietly, running
his spatulate fingers up and down the flutings of the
glass, “. . . there was something about van der Goes. At
least I like to think there was. Something special about
any artist, of course. A sort of magic — in the literal
sense. Unriddling the signatures of nature, and breath-
ing the same secrets back. It’s like that, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that for me, but there
are many artists who would like it to be like that. But
the problem with magic is that it doesn’t work.”

“Like hell,” Mordecai said quietly.

“Can you scoff at God and believe in demons?”

“What are demons? I believe in elemental powers:
sylphs, salamanders, undines, gnomes — parables of
primal matter. You smile and sneer and cuddle up in
the comfortable Jesuitical universe of College Physics.

Page 15

Matter has no mysteries left for you, oh no! No more
than the spirit does. All tidy and known, like a mother’s
cooking. Well, ostriches feel at home in the universe
too, though they can’t see it.”

“Believe me, Mordecai, I’d be happy in a world of
sylphs and salamanders; any poet would. What do you
think we’ve all been bellyaching about these past two
hundred years? We’ve been evicted.”

“But you still sneer at the words. For you they’re
nothing but a Russian ballet, a tinkle of bells. But I
have seen the salamanders, dwelling in the midst of
flames.”

“Mordecai! The very notion that flame is an element
is nonsense. Half a semester of chemistry would dis-
abuse you of that idea. High school chemistry, at that.”
“Flame is the element of change,” he said, in an
exalted, orgulous tone, “of the transubstantial. It’s the
bridge between the matter and spirit. What else is it
lives in the heart of your giant cyclotrons? Or at the
heart of the sun? You believe in angels, don’t you — the
mediaries between this and the farthest sphere. Well, I
have spoken with them.”

“The farthest sphere — that which God inhabits?”
“Gaud, Gaud! I prefer familiar spirits — my sylphs
and salamanders — who will answer when spoken to.
Two in the hand are worth one in the bush. But there’s
no use our arguing. Not yet. Wait till you’ve seen my
laboratory. Unless we adjust our vocabularies for
mutual comprehension, we’ll go on oscillating between
Sic and Non till fucking doomsday.”

“I’m sorry — I’m not usually so inflexible. I imagine
it’s a matter less of reasoned dissent than of mental self-
preservation. It would be easy to let myself be swept up
in your rhetoric. That’s meant to be a compliment, you
know.”

“It bugs you, doesn’t it, that I’m smarter than you
are?”

“Didn’t it bug you, Mordecai, when the tables were
turned, when you knew me first? Besides . . Smiling,
trying to put a good face on the matter. . . I’m not
sure you are.”

“Oh, I am, I am. Believe me. Or test me, if you’d
like. Any time. Just name your weapon, baby. Pick a
science, any science. Maybe a formal debate would suit
you better? Do you know the dates of the reigns of the
kings of England, France, Spain, Sweden, Prussia? A
scramble up the slopes of Finnegan’s Wake perhaps?
Haikus?”

“Stop! I believe you. But God damn it, there’s still
one field that I’d win in yet, superman.”

Mordecai tossed his head back defiantly. “What’s
that?”

“Orthoepy.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. What’s orthoepy?”

“The study of correct pronunciation.”

Lucifer, falling from heaven, was not so dismayed.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s so. But damn it, I don’t have the
time to look up and see how every dinky word is pro-

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Page 16

nounced. But when I say a thing the wrong way, will
you correct me?”

“I suppose a poet should be good for that, if nothing
else.”

“Oh, there’s a lot that we’ve got lined up for you.
You’ll have to talk with George again. Not today, he’s
in sickbay today. He has some great ideas for putting
on Doctor Faustus here, but we’ve been waiting till you
were around. And there’s one other thing too. . .?” Un-
characteristically, Mordecai seemed unsure of his
ground.

“And that?”

“I’ve written something. A story. I thought you could
read it and tell me what you think. Haast has promised
I can send it out to a magazine, after N.S.A. has checked
it out. But I’m not sure it’s good enough. I mean, in an
absolute sense. Everybody here likes it, but we’ve be-
come an awfully tight little group. Inbred. You’ve still
got your own head on your shoulders though.”

“I’d be glad to read it, and I assure you I’ll be as
nasty a critic as I know how. What’s it about?”

“About? Jesus Christ, that’s a hell of a question to
get from a poet. It’s about van der Goes, as a matter of
fact.”

“And what is N.S.A.?”

“National Security Agency. The code boys. They
check over everything we say — it all goes down on tape,
you know— to make sure we’re not being . . . hermetic.”

“Are you being hermetic?”

Mordecai, the alchemist, winked. “Abra-cadabra,” he
said meaningfully. Then, quick as a sylph, he was gone.

Later:

In summary? As easily summarise a tiltawhirl.

Guilt certainly, for having been the agent of Morde-
cai’s falling-away. It never ceases to amaze how far-
reaching an effect our slightest actions may have. The
monk in his cloister entertains an error, imagining the
danger to be only his, but a century hence his heresy
may have convulsed nations. Perhaps the conservatives
are right, perhaps free thought is dangerous.

But how the Old Adam, Louie II, protests at that!
Do what I will, I can never quite silence him. It takes
all the force of volition at times to prevent his voice
from speaking aloud. He is always waiting, crouched in
my heart, to usurp the sovereignity of reason.

But guilt is only a small part of what I feel. Wonder
and awe, much more. Like some watcher of the skies/
When a new planet swims into his ken. The morning
star. Lucifer, prince of darkness. Tempter.

June 8

7u viel, zu viel! I have been all the day talking, talk-
ing. My mind is a 33 record being played at 78.
I’ve met all but three or four of the score that are here;
among themselves the prisoners are even more daunting
than taken singly. The resonances of those many meet-
ings still swell up within me, like reminiscences of music

after the opera.

It began early, when a guard brought me an ink-damp
invitation to visit George W. in the sickbay, than which
no hospital, not Wren’s Chelsea, could be more mag-
nificent. His bed might have been by Tiepolo. And
flowers by the Douanier Rousseau. We talked more of
Rilke, whom George admires less for his craft than for
his heretic notions. He’s done his own translations.
Eccentric prosody. I reserved judgement. Discussed his
ideas for staging Faustus, which led to his project for a
model theatre. It is to be built for him down here!
(There is no longer any question but that Camp A. is
deep underground.)

I can’t remember the names of all the others, or all
that was said. Only one, Murray Something-or-other, an
overfine young fellow with a porcelain manner, did I
take a decided dislike to, which he reciprocated (though
I may be flattering myself: more likely he didn’t even
know I was there). He led a fiery discussion of alchymi-
cal jabberwork. Which I would paraphrase so: “Two
cocks coupling in darkness; from their brood are
hatched dragontailed chicks. In seven times seven days
these are burned, their ashes triturated in vessels of
sacred lead.” To which I say: Pish! But how earnestly
they regarded his pish! As I later confirmed, this pre-
occupation has been largely Mordecai’s doing.

Whom I liked best was Barry Meade. I’m always
pleased to meet people fatter than myself. Meade is
hung up on movies, and at two o’clock, when George
had to be sedated for his nap (poor George is in bad
shape, but everyone I asked seems to have a different
notion of the cause), he took me to the little projection
room three levels down and showed me a montage he
has made of McNamara’s policy speeches and scream-
ing women, clipped out of old horror movies. Hilarity
mounting to hysteria. Barry, very cool, kept apologising
for imperceptible nuances of error.

4.30. George was awake again, but he ignored me for
a mathbook. I begin to have the feeling that, like a child
visiting childless relatives for a holiday, the responsi-
bility for my entertainment is being parcelled out among
them. It happened in the afternoon, at least, that I came
under the care of one who was introduced to me simply
as “the Bishop”. I suspect it is his dandified clothes
earned him the nickname. He exposited the social order
that has evolved here. In brief, it stands thus: that Mor-
decai, by main strength and charisma, is the unchal-
lenged czar of a benevolent anarchy. The Bishop comes
to Camp A. not out of the brig but from an Army
mental hospital, where he had been two years suffering
from total amnesia. He made a fascinating, droll and
scary recital of his multiple suicide attempts. He once
drank a whole quart of lead paint. Yech.

Later on, he walloped me at chess.

Still later on, Murray Something-or-other played
electronic music. (His own? Somebody said yes, some-
one else said no.) In my manic condition even that
sounded good.

Page 17

And more. And more. Ossa on Pelion.

Too much. I’ll say it again. And what is to come of
it all? Why was this splendid monster given life? Tune
in tomorrow.

June 9

Ah, but it’s one of those tomorrows — the sort when I
feel that entropy is winning. I feel, on this tomorrow, as
hollow as a papier-mache mask, all grin and wink and
wrinkle. The truth perhaps — the true truth — is not so
much that the mask is hollow as that I don’t care to
look behind it at the nystagmic flicker of image image
image that the nethermind is broadcasting to the faulty
receptor of the overmind. I am bad and silly and de-
feated today, I am sick.

There were visitors — Mordecai, Meade, a note from
George W. — but I maintain myself in solitude, claiming
to be not myself. Who then?

I have been too long out of the lifegiving sun. That’s
my problem.

And I cannot think two thoughts in sequence. Ahime.

June 10

Much better, thank you. Yes, it feels quite good. Now
once again I look on the sunny side of defeat.

Facts:

Another call on H.H. Having become accustomed to
the plastery whiteness of prisoners and guards alike, the
sunlamped softness of his face (like Tastee White Bread,
toasted) seemed more than ever an offence against the
natural order. If that is health, then let diseases waste
me!

We talked of this that and another. He commended
my journal’s factoricity (sic) in general, but took excep-
tion to yesterday’s entry, which was too subjective. If I
should ever start feeling subjective again I need only
say the word and a guard will bring a tranquilizer. We
can’t afford to let the precious days slip away from us,
can we?

And thus, and so, the greased cams and tappets of his
banality bobbed and lolloped up and down, to and fro,
upon predictable, rotary paths — and then he asked me:
“So you’ve met Siegfried, have' you?”

“Siegfried?” I asked, thinking this might be his nick-
name for Mordecai.

He winked. “You know . . . Dr. Busk?”

“Siegfried?” I asked once more, more puzzled than
before. “How so?”

“You know — like the Siegfried Line. Impregnable.
It’s because I was sure that she’s a cold fish that I had
her recruited for this project. Ordinarily it wouldn’t do
to have women in a situation like this, having to work
with a bunch of horny G.I.s — and more than one of
them coloured. But with Siegfried it doesn’t make any
difference.”

“It sounds as if you speak from experience,” I
suggested.

“WACs,” Haast said, shaking his head. “Some of

them can’t get enough of it; others. . . .” He leaned for-
ward confidentially. “Don’t put this into your journal,
Sacchetti, but the fact of the matter is that she still has
her cherry.”

“No!” I protested.

“Don’t get me wrong — Siegfried is an A-OK worker.
She knows her business like nobody else, and she’d
never let her feelings get in the way of business. Psycho-
logists, as a rule, are apt to be sentimental, you know —
they like to help people. Not Busk. If she has any fail-
ing, it’s a lack of imagination. Sometimes she’s a little
limited in her way of thinking. Too . . . you know . . .
conventional. Don’t misunderstand me — I respect
science as much as the next man — ”

I nodded yes, yes, not misunderstanding him.
“Without science we wouldn’t have radiation, or com-
puters, or Krebiozen, or men on the moon. But science
is only one way of looking at things. Of course I don’t
let Siegfried say anything directly to the boys . . .” —
as Haast calls his guinea pigs — “. . . but I think they
can sense her hostility anyhow. Fortunately they haven’t
let that dampen their enthusiasm. The important thing,
as even Busk realises, is to let them steer their own
course. They’ve got to break away from the old patterns
of thought, blaze trails, explore.”

“But what is it exactly,” I asked, “that Busk doesn’t
approve of?”

Again he leaned forward confidentially, puckering the
deltas of tanned wrinkles about his eyes. “There’s no
reason I shouldn’t be the one to tell you, Sacchetti.
You’ll find out soon enough from one of the boys. Mor-
decai is going to perform the Magnum Opus!”

“Is he?” I said, savouring Haast’s credulity.

He flinched, as sensitive to the first hint of scepticism
as a fern to sunlight. “Yes, he is! I know what you’re
thinking, Sacchetti. You’re thinking just what old Sieg-
fried thinks — that Mordecai has me hoodwinked. That
I’m being conned, as the saying goes.”

“It suggests itself as a possibility,” I admitted. Then,
salving the wound: “You wouldn’t want me to be in-
sincere, would you?”

“No no, — anything but that.” He settled back in his
chair with a sigh, letting the intently-gathered wrinkles
diffuse over his face, ripples on the shallow pool of his
fatuity.

“I’m not surprised,” he went on, “by your attitude.
Having read your account of your talk with Mordecai, I
should have realised. . . . Most people have the same
reaction at first, you know. They think that alchemy is
some kind of black magic. They don’t realise it’s a
science, just like any other. The first science, as a matter
of fact, and the only science, even now, that isn’t afraid
to look at all the facts. Are you a materialist, Sacchetti?”
“Nooo ... I wouldn’t say that.”

“But that’s what science has become nowadays! Pure
materialism and nothing else. Try and tell somebody
about super-natural facts — that is to say, facts that are
superior to the facts of natural science — and they close

Page 18

their eyes and stop their ears. They have no idea of the
amount of Study, the' hundreds of Volumes, the cen-
turies of Research. . .

I think he had been about to round out this last
phrase with “& Development” but caught himself in
time.

“I’ve noticed,” he went on, though veering, “that you
mention Thomas Aquinas more than once in your
journals. Well, did you ever stop to think that he was an
alchemist? He was, and his teacher, Albertus Magnus,
was an even greater alchemist! For centuries the very
best minds of Europe studied hermetic science, but
nowadays someone like you or Busk comes along and
without bothering to learn a thing about it, you discount
all their work as nothing more than just a pack of
superstitions. Who’s being superstitious though, eh?
Who’s making judgements without evidence? Eh? Eh?
Have you ever read a book about alchemy — one single
book?”

I had to admit that I had not read one single book
about alchemy.

Haast triumphed: “And yet you think you’re qualified
to sit in judgement on centuries of scholars and dee-
vines?” There was an echo in his pronunciation of this
word, and indeed in the whole tone and content of his
discourse, of Mordecai.

“Take a piece of advice from me, Sacchetti.”

“You can call me Louie, sir.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean to say . . . Louie. Keep an
open mind, and be receptive to Fresh Approaches. All
the great advances in Human History, from Galileo — ”
Another splendid, horrendous Mordecaism. “ — down
through Edison in our own time, have been made by
people who dared to be different.”

I promised to be open and receptive, but H.H.,
warmed to his subject, would not abate. He demolished
whole battalions of straw men and demonstrated, with
a dreamlike logic, that the whole disheartening story of
the last three years in Malaysia has been due to the un-
receptivity of certain key figures in Washington, un-
named, to Fresh Approaches.

Whenever I put questions of any particularity to him,
however, he grew reticent and canny. I was not ready,
he intimated, to be made privy to the mysteries. From
his Army days Haast has preserved an unswervable
faith in the efficacy of secrets: knowledge is devalued
whenever it becomes 1 too generally known.

I can no longer have any doubt of the fidelity of
Berrigan’s portrait of “General Uhrlick” in Mars in
Conjunction (which is not. I’ve noticed, available at our
own library), and I can understand why Haast, though
he cried slander to the four winds and did all he could
to ruin Berrigan, never dared take him to court. The
credulous old fool did conduct the whole damned
miserable year-long campaign on Auaui by astrology!

Let us hope that history will not repeat itself ver-
batim, that Mordecai is not, too cunningly, performing
Berrigan’s fatal role.

Later:

Be it noted: I am reading one single book on alchemy.
Haast sent it by messenger within minutes of our leave-
taking. Rene Alleau’s Aspects de I'alchemie tradi-
tionelle, with an accompanying typescript translation in
a top secret folder.

It reads, pleasantly enough, like a crank letter, the
kind that begins:

“Dear Editor,

“ You probably won’t dare to print this letter,
but. . .

June 11

e faustus rehearsal: a disappointment, a delight
and then the horrid, swift decline to reality.

I don’t know what I had been expecting from George
W. as a director. Something on the order of the fabled
(and possibly non-existent) Genet “underground” pro-
ductions of the late ’60’s, I suppose. But his design for
Faustus was a mild pastiche of theatre-in-the-round and
the laboursome lutulence of Wieland Wagner’s stagings
for Bayreuth. Of course when the audience consists in
only those actors not required onstage — and myself with
the prompt book (quite unnecessary as it turned out;
even for this first run-through they knew all their lines)
— a proscenium would be cumbersome and out-of-keep-
ing. But to suppose that a peasoup fog is an enhance-
ment to tragedy is mere muddleheadedness, and reac-
tionary to boot. Hell is murky, true — but Scotland need
not seem so.

So, it appears that (I’m happy to report) our young
geniuses can err. This is a judgement, however, based
on 20 years of rabid, indiscriminate and usually dis-
appointed theatre-going. The wonder of G’s Faustus is
that not he nor any of the prisoners here has ever seen
a play on the stage. Movies, yes, and more than once it
was by misappropriating camera techniques that G.
came a-cropper.

But this is all niggling and higgling. As soon as they
began to act, all the fog rolled back and only admira-
tion was possible. To borrow a phrase from Mordecai:
the actors deserve the very highest allocades!

I missed my chance, way back when, to see Burton
in the role, but I can’t imagine that he would have been
much better than George Wagner. Burton’s voice cer-
tainly would have been nobler in that last soliloquy,
but could he have convinced one so well that here, in
veritas, breathing and whole, was the mediaeval school-
man, God-haunted and blaspheming God, fatally and
heroically in love with Knowledge? Could Burton have
made Knowledge seem so horrible and veiled a thing, a
succubus, as when, in the opening scene Faustus sighs:
“ Sweet Analytics, ’tis thou has ravished me/”? When
he said that I could feel my arteries dilate to receive,
ravished too, her poisons.

Mordecai played Mephistopheles — so much less im-
pressive in Marlowe’s than in Goethe’s version, though

Continued on Page 24

Page 19

Page 20

THE DEATH MODULE

j.g.ballard

T he impact zone. The tragic failure of these isolation
tests, reluctantly devised by Trabert before his
resignation, were to have bizarre consequences upon
the future of the Institute and the already uneasy
relationships between the members of the research
staff. Catherine Austin stood in the doorway of
Trabert’s office, watching the reflection of the tele-
vision screen flicker across the slides of exposed spinal
levels. The magnified images of the newsreels from
Cape Kennedy dappled the enamel walls and ceiling,
transforming the darkened room into a huge cubicular
screen. She stared at the transcriptions clipped to the
memo-board on Trabert’s desk, listening to the barely
audible murmur of the sound-track. The announcer’s
voice became a commentary on the elusive sexuality
of this strange man, on the false deaths of the three
astronauts in the Apollo capsule, and on the eroded
landscapes of Max Ernst which the volunteers in the
isolation tests had described so poignantly in their last
transmissions.

The Polite Wassermann. Margaret Trabert lay on the
bloodshot candlewick of the bedspread, unsure whether
to dress now that Trabert had taken the torn flying
jacket from his wardrobe. All day he had been listening
to the news bulletins on the pirate stations, his eyes
hidden behind the dark glasses as if deliberately con-
cealing himself from the white walls of the apartment
and its unsettled dimensions. He stood by the window
with his back to her, playing with the photographs of
the isolation volunteers. He looked down at her naked
body, with its unique geometry of touch and feeling,
as exposed now as the amorphous faces of the test
subjects, codes of insoluble nightmares. The sense of
her body’s failure, like the incinerated musculatures
of the three astronauts whose after-deaths were now
being transmitted from Cape Kennedy, had dominated

their last week together. He pointed to the pallid
face of a young man whose photograph he had pinned
above the bed like the icon of some algebraic magus.
“Kline, Coma, Xero — there was a fourth pilot on
board the capsule. You’ve caught him in your womb.”

The University of Death. These erotic films, over
which presided the mutilated figure of Ralph Nader,
were screened above Dr. Nathan’s head as he moved
along the lines of smashed cars. Illuminated by the
arc-lights, the rushes of the test collisions played on
to the walls of the Neurology wing defined the sexual
ambiguities of the abandoned motorcade. As he stepped
over the metering coils this apotheosis of Ralph Nader,
successor of Kant and Hume, quantified the disasters
of time and space he had seen in the failure of the
isolation tests, and in the fire-deaths of Cape Kennedy.

Indicators of Sexual Arousal. During the interval
when the reels changed. Dr. Nathan saw Trabert peer-
ing at the photographs pinned to the windshields of
the crashed cars. From the balcony of his empty office
Catherine Austin watched him with barely focused
eyes. Her leg stance, significant indicator of sexual
arousal, confirmed all Dr. Nathan had anticipated of
Trabert’s involvement with the events of Dealey Plaza,
with the suicide of Marilyn Monroe and the alternate
deaths of Oswald and Malcolm X. Behind him there
was a shout from the camera crew. An enormous
photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy had appeared in
the empty rectangle of the screen. A bearded young
man with an advanced neuro-muscular tremor in his
lower legs stood in the brilliant pearl light, his lamina-
ted suit bathed in the magnified image of Mrs. Ken-
nedy’s mouth. As he walked towards Trabert across
the broken bodies of the plastic dummies the screen
jerked into a nexus of impacting cars, a soundless

Page 21

concertina of speed and violence.

The Transition Area. During this period, as Trabert
prepared for his departure, the elements of apocalyptic
landscapes waited on the horizons of his mind, wrecked
helicopters burning among broken gantries. With
deliberate caution, he waited in the empty apartment
near the airport overpass, disengaging himself from
the images of his wife, Catherine Austin and the
patients at the Institute. Wearing his old flying jacket,
he listened to the unending commentaries from Cape
Kennedy — already he realised that the transmissions
were coming from sources other than the television and
radio stations. The deaths of the three astronauts in
the Apollo capsule were a failure of the code that
contained the operating formulae for their passage
through consciousness. Many factors confirmed this
faulty eucharist of time and space — the dislocated per-
spectives of the apartment, his isolation from his own
and his wife’s body (he moved restlessly from one room
to the next, as if unable to contain the volumes of
his limbs and thorax), the serial deaths of Ralph Nader
on the advertisement hoardings that lined the airport
approaches. Later, when he saw the young man in
the laminated suit watching him from the abandoned
amusement park, Trabert knew that the time had come
for his rescue attempt, the resurrection of the dead
space-men.

Algebra of the Sky. At dawn Trabert found himself
driving along an entry highway into the deserted city:
terrain of shacks and filling stations, overhead wires
like some forgotten algebra of the sky. When the
helicopters appeared he left the car and set off on
foot. Sirens wailing, white-doored squad cars screamed
past them, neuronic icons on the spinal highway. Fifty
yards ahead, the young man in the astronaut’s suit
plodded along the asphalt verge. Pursued by helicopters
and strange police, they took refuge in an empty
stadium. Sitting in the deserted stand, Trabert watched
the young man pace at random around the pitch,
replicating some meaningless labyrinth as if trying to
focus his own identity. Outside, Kline walked in the
sculpture garden of the air terminal. His aloof, cerebral
face warned Trabert that his rendezvous with Coma
and Xero would soon take place.

A Watching Trinity. Personae of the unconscious :
Xero : Run hot with a million programmes, this terrify-
ing figure seemed to Trabert like some vast neural
switchboard. During their time together, as he sat in
the rear seat of the white Pontiac, he was never to
see Xero’s face, but fragments of his amplified voice
reverberated among the deserted stands of the stadium,
echoing through the departure bays of the air terminal.

Coma : This beautiful but mute young woman,
madonna of the time-ways, surveyed Trabert with
maternal eyes, epiphanies of calm and death.

Kline: “Why must we await, and fear, a disaster in

space in order to understand our own time?— Matta.”

The Karen Novotny Experience. As she pov dered
herself after her bath, Karen Novotny watched Trabert
kneeling on the floor of the lounge, surrounded by the
litter of photographs like some eccentric Zen camera-
man. Since their meeting at the emergency conference
on Space Medicine he had done nothing but shuffle the
photographs of wrecked capsules and automobiles,
searching for one face among the mutilated victims.
Almost without thinking she had picked him up in
the basement cinema after the secret Apollo film,
impelled by his exhausted eyes and the torn flying
jacket with its Viet Nam flashes. Was he a doctor,
or a patient? Neither category seemed valid, nor for that
matter mutually exclusive. Their period in the apart-
ment together had been one of almost narcotic
domesticity. In the planes of her body, in the contours
of her breasts and thighs, he seemed to mimetise all
his dreams and obessions, with Ralph Nader, Oswald
and Minkowski space-time. In many ways, she reflec-
ted as she sprayed the Guerlain heliotrope at her arm-
pits, he seemed totally unaware of her own identity.

Pentax Zoom. In these equations, the gestures and
postures of the young woman, Trabert explored the
faulty dimensions of the space capsule, the lost geo-
metry and volumetric time of the dead astronauts.

(1) Lateral section through the left axillary fossa of
Karen Novotny, the elbow raised in a gesture of pique:
the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader.

(2) A series of paintings of imaginary sexual organs.
As he walked around the exhibition, conscious of
Karen’s hand gripping his wrist, Trabert searched for
some valid point of junction. These obscene images,
the headless creatures of a nightmare, grimaced at him
like the exposed corpses in the Apollo capsule, the
victims of a thousand auto-crashes.

(3) “The Stolen Mirror” (Max Ernst). In the eroded
causeways and porous rocktowers of this spinal land-
scape Trabert saw the blistered epithelium of the
astronauts, the time-invaded skin of Karen Novotny.

A Cosmogonic Venus. Dr. Nathan followed the
young man in the laminated suit across the forecourt
of the deserted air terminal. The metalled light
shivered across the white steps like the defective
image in some huge kinetic artefact. Unhurried, Dr.
Nathan stopped by the sculpture fountain to light a
cigarette. He had been following the young man all
morning, intrigued by this dialogue of motion and
perspective played out in complete silence against the
background of the air terminal. The young man looked
back at Dr. Nathan, as if waiting for him. A half-
formed smile crossed his bruised mouth, revealing the
scars of some automobile accident barely hidden by
the pale beard. Dr. Nathan gazed round at the fore-
court, suddenly thinking of Max Planck and the dying
Fermi. Someone had drained the ornamental pool.

Page 22

Like an immense uterus, its neck pointing towards the
departure bays, it lay drying in the sunlight. The
young man climbed the rim and walked down the
sloping bowl to the centre. Dr. Nathan laughed briefly
into his gold-tipped cigarette. “What a woman!” Per-
haps Trabert would become her lover, tend her as she
gave birth to the sky?

The Abandoned Motorcade. Walking through the
deserted streets with Kline and Coma, Trabert found
the motorcade abandoned in the sunlight. They moved
along the rows of smashed cars, seating themselves at
random beside the mannequins. Images of the Zapruder
film hung on the fractured windshields, fusing with his
dreams of Oswald and Nader. Somewhere the moving
figure of a young man formed a plane of intersection.
Later, by the drained swimming pool, he played with
the life-sized plaster replicas of his wife and Karen
Novotny. All week, to please Coma, he had studied
the Zapruder frames, imitating the hair-style of the
President’s widow. As the helicopter flew overhead
its down-draught whirled at the matted wigs, driving
into a cloud the photographs of Marina Oswald,
Madame Chiang and Mrs. Kennedy which Trabert had
laid out like some strange hand of patience on the floor
of the pool.

Operating Formulae. Gesturing Catherine Austin into
the chair beside his desk. Dr. Nathan studied the ele-
gant and mysterious advertisements which had
appeared that afternoon in the copies of Vogue and
Paris-Match. In sequence they advertised: (1) The left
orbit and zygomatic arch of Marina Oswald. (2) The
angle between two walls. (3) A “neural interval” — a
balcony unit on the 27th floor of the Hilton Hotel,
London. (4) A pause in an unreported conversation
outside an exhibition of photographs of automobile
accidents. (5) The time, 11.47 a.m., June 23, 1969.
(6) A gesture — a supine forearm extended across a
candlewick bedspread. (7) A moment of recognition —
a young woman’s buccal pout and dilated eyes.

"What exactly is he trying to sell?" Ignoring
Catherine Austin, Dr. Nathan walked over to the
photographs of the isolation volunteers on the enamel
wall beside the window. The question revealed either
an astonishing ignorance or a complicity in that con-
spiracy of the unconscious he had only now begun to
unravel. He turned to face the young woman, irritated
as always by her strong, quizzical gaze, an overlay of
her own potent sexuality. “You, Dr. Austin. These
advertisements constitute an explicit portrait of your-
self, a contour map of your own body, an obscene
newsreel of yourself during intercourse.” He rapped
the magazines with his gold cigarette case. “These
images are fragments in a terminal moraine left behind
by your passage through consciousness.”

"Planes Intersect." Dr. Nathan pointed to the photo-

graph of a young man with a pale beard, the cast in
his left eye displacing one side of his face. “Planes
intersect: on one level, the tragedies of Cape Kennedy
and Viet Nam serialised on billboards, random deaths
mimetised in the experimental auto-disasters of Nader
and his co-workers. Their precise role in the uncon-
scious merits closer scrutiny, by the way, they may in
fact play very different parts from the ones we assign
them. On another level, the immediate personal en-
vironment, the volumes of space enclosed by your
opposed hands, the geometry of your postures, the
time-values contained in this office, the angles between
these walls. On a third level, the inner world of the
psyche. Where these planes intersect, images are born,
some kind of valid reality begins to clarify itself.”

The Soft Quasars.

Pre-uterine Claims — Kline.

“Young Virgin auto-sodomised by her own chastity”
— Coma.

Time-zones: Ralph Nader, Claude Eatherly, Abra-
ham Zapruder, replicators of the dream — Xero.

The Departure Platform. Closer to this presiding
trinity, Trabert waited among the departure bays in
the deserted terminal. From the observation deck above
the drained sculpture fountain. Coma watched him with
her rune-filled eyes. Her broad cheek-bones, reminis-
cent now of the President’s widow, seemed to contain
an immense glacial silence. On the roof terrace, Kline
walked among the mannequins. The plaster models of
Marina Oswald, Ralph Nader and the young man in
the laminated suit stood by the railing. Xero, mean-
while, moved with galvanic energy across the runways,
assembling an immense motorcade of wrecked cars.
Behind the advance car, the Presidential limousine
waited in the sunlight. The silence before a million
auto-deaths hung in the morning air.

A Mere Modulus. As Margaret Trabert hesitated
among the passengers in the crowded departure build-
ing, Dr. Nathan came up behind her. His small face
was dwarfed by the vast mural of a satellite capsule
still drying on the wall above the escalators, the artist’s
trestles like a huge gantry that would carry the entire
building into orbit. “Mrs. Trabert — don’t you under-
stand? This young woman with him is a mere modulus.
His real target is yourself — ” Irritated as always by
Nathan, she brushed past the police detective who tried
to block her way and ran out into the forecourt.
Among the thousands of cars in the parking lot she
could see the white Pontiac. All week the young woman
in the white car had been following her husband like
some animal in rut.

The Target Vehicle. Dr. Nathan pointed through the
windshield with his cigarette. Two hundred yards ahead
Margaret Trabert’s car had turned out of a motel
driveway. It set off along the deserted street, a white

Page 23

integer beneath the unravelling ciphers of the over-
head wires. “This motorcade,” Dr. Nathan explained
as they set off, “we may interpret as a huge environ-
mental tableau, a mobile psychodrama which recapitu-
lates the Apollo disaster in terms of both Dealey Plaza
and the experimental car crashes examined so obses-
sively by Nader. In some way, presumably by a cathar-
tic collision, Trabert will try to reintegrate space and
so liberate the three men in the capsule. For him they
still wait there on their contour couches.” As Catherine
Austin touched his elbow he realised that he had lost
sight of the white car.

The Command Module. Watched by Kline and
Coma, Trabert moved behind the steering wheel of
the open limousine. Behind the empty jump seats the
plastic mannequins of the President and his wife sat
in the rear of the car. As the motorcade moved off,
Trabert peered through the frosted windshield. An
immense target disc had been painted at the conjunc-
tion of the runways. From the departure area a white
car turned on to the next runway and accelerated on
a collision course toward the motorcade.

Zapruder Frame 235. Trabert waited until the
audience had left the basement cinema. Holding in his

hand the commercial replica of agent Greer’s driving
licence he had bought in the arcade near the flyover,
he walked towards the young man sitting in the back
row. Already his identity had begun to fade, the
choreography of his hands tracing a last cipher across
the blunted air.

Epiphany of these Deaths. The bodies of his wife
and Karen Novotny lay on the floor of the empty
swimming pool. In the car port Coma and Kline had
taken their seats in the white Pontiac. Trabert watched
them prepare to leave. At the last moment Coma
seemed to hesitate, her broad mouth showing the
scars on her lower lip. When they had gone, the heli-
copters rose from their waiting grounds along the high-
way. Trabert looked up as the sky was filled with these
insane machines. Yet in the contours of his wife’s
thighs, in the dune-filled eyes of Karen Novotny, he
saw the assuaged time of the astronauts, the serene face
of the President’s widow.

The Serial Angels. Undisturbed now, the vapor-
ising figures of the dead astronauts diffused across the
launching grounds, recreated in the leg stances of a
hundred starlets, in a thousand bent auto-fenders, in
the million instalment deaths of the serial magazines.

Camp Concentration: continued from page 19

one would not have thought so to see Mordecai tear
through it. He delivered the lines that begin “Why this
is hell, nor am I out of it” with chilling grace, as though
this admission of irrevocable damnation and despair
were nothing more than an epigram, some piece of in-
consequence by Sheridan or Wilde.

And oh! I might go on praising, singling out a touch
here, a phrasing there, a piece of business, but it would
come down to the same thing — I would have to relate
how in the last act Faustus, lamenting in those last
agonised minutes before hell would claim him, sudden-
ly ceased to be Faustus: again, and with terrible vio-
lence, George Wagner lost every scrap and dribble from
his stomach. He sobbed and choked, rolling on the
slippery stage in a sort of fit, until the guards came to
carry him back to the infirmary, leaving the make-
believe devils empty-handed in the wings.

“Mordecai,” I asked, “what is it? Is he still sick?
What’s wrong with him?”

And Mordecai, icily, not yet out of character: “Why,
that’s the price all good men must pay for knowledge.
That’s what comes of eating magic apples.”

“You mean that the . . . drug they’ve given you, the
drug that’s made you so . . . that it can do that too?”
He smiled a pained smile and reached up a heavy
hand to remove his horns.

“What the hell,” said Murray Sandemann (which —
not Something-or-other — is the surname of the alchymi-

cal enthusiast). Why don’t you answer asshole’s ques-
tion?”

“Shut up, Murray,” Mordecai said.

“Oh, don’t worry about me. I won’t tell him. It
wasn’t me, after all, who had him brought here. But
now that he is here, isn’t it a bit late to be so solicitous
of his innocence?”

“Just shut up.”

“I mean,” Murray concluded, “did anyone worry
about our eating magic apples?”

Mordecai turned to regard me, his dark face almost
invisible in the caliginous stagelight. “Do you want your
question answered, Sacchetti? Because from now on, if
you don’t, you shouldn’t ask.”

“Tell me,” I said, feeling trapped into a show of
greater daring than I really felt. (Was this how Adam
fell?) “I want to know.”

“George is dying. He’s got a couple weeks left, with
any luck. Less, I suppose, after what we’ve just seen.”
“We’re all dying,” Murray Sandemann said.
Mordecai nodded, poker-faced as ever. “We’re all
dying. From the drug they gave us. Pallidine. It rots the
brain. It takes nine months to do the job thoroughly,
sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. And
all the while you rot you’re getting smarter. Until — ”
Mordecai, his left hand sweeping low, elegantly indica-
ted the pool of George’s vomit.

(Part 2 will be published next month)

Page 24

JOHN T. SLADEK:

1937 A.DJ

Picture, if you will, an inventor, working in his
bicycle shop in 1878. His long hair occasionally
falls in his eyes; he shakes it aside impatiently, flexes
sinewy arms against the pull of a wrench, biting his lip
with preoccupation. Now and then he may pause to sip
some of the cool lemonade his widowed Mom has
brought to him, sip and glance up at the picture of Sam
Franklin on the whitewashed plank wall. Early to bed
and early to rise ... he thinks. A penny saved is a
penny earned. His serious brows knit, as he ferrets the
last bit of truth from these proverbs.

Such an inventor was Emil Hart. He and his mother
shared a small cottage exactly in the centre of the
state of Kiowa. Their modest home was otherwise
undistinguished except for a heavy mortgage, which the
good widow hoped to reduce. Toward that end she
knitted clever antimacmillans (lacy affairs designed to
protect the tops of sofas and chairs from a then-popular
hair grease called MacMillan’s) and sold peafowl eggs.
Emil augmented this meagre income by repairing
bicycles and selling the Friday evening post (founded
by Sam Franklin). Yet he knew fate intended for him
a greater calling — inventor of the Time Engine!

One day Fenton Morbes, the town bully, stopped
by. Seeing the great engine spread over the entire
shop, he whistled with amazement.

“What’cher doing?” he asked.

“I’m only filing a bit of isinglass,” said Emil, shaking
the hair from his eyes. He had no time to waste speak-
ing to Morbes.

“I mean, what’cher building?” Morbes removed his
bicycle clips and tossed them carelessly into a corner.
They were made of costly aluminium, for he was rich.

Emil sighed. “I’m building a temporal extrapolator,”
he said. “It will enable me to go into the future.”

The bully guffawed. “Stuff!” he said. “Nobody kin
go into the future!”

With a knowing smile, Emil bent over his work.

After fitting the piece of isinglass into a gear of peculiar
shape, he set about attaching a pair of wires to a
telegraph key.

Morbes flushed red about the nostrils of his broad,
saddle-like nose. He was not used to being ignored.
“Stuff!” he exclaimed once more. “Even if it works,
this here engine won’t bring in enough to feed your
peafowls, let alone pay the mortgage when my Paw
comes around to foreclose.”

“Foreclose!” said the young inventor, growing pale.

“Yep. You’d better have a hundred dollars ready by
next Monday,” said Morbes with a grin. “Tell you
what. If you’ll wash my bicycle. I’ll give you a whole
dollar. Get it spanking clean, now, for I’m to go on a
picnic today, with Miss Maud Peed.”

At this news, Emil grew even paler, and staggered
back as though he’d been struck.

“Oh, I know you been kinda sweet on her,” smirked
the bully. “But she ain’t got no time for a crazy feller
what putters around his bicycle shop with time engines.
Hah!”

No time for him! As the colour continued to ebb
from Emil’s face, and into the coarser features of his
rival, he wondered what strange fate it was that had
made them both suitors for the hand of the lovely
Maud Peed. So be it. He raised his tear-filled eyes once
more to the portrait of Sam Franklin. He seemed to
draw strength from the homely features, the rheumy
eyes. What was the right thing to do, the truly
Columbian thing? To try to stay and win Maud back
from Fenton Morbes — a hopeless task? Or to escape
into the bright future, and there seek his fortune?

In a moment he had made his decision. He would
go into tomorrow! He would see 1937 A.D., that
promised land — the very system of numbering our years
promised it! He would drink in its wonders: flying
machines, the bridge across the English Channel,
immortality through mesmerism, electric cannon, a

Page 25

world at peace, where the sun never set on the flag of
the United States of Columbia !

“Are you gonna stand gawking at that pitcher or
are you gonna wash my wheel?” demanded Morbes.

“Neither. You may take yourself off my property
at once,” replied Emil. Raising his clenched fists, he
added, “Go to Maud Peed. And tell her — tell her — ”

His hands dropped to his sides, and as his head
bowed, the unruly lock of hair fell over his eyes. He
looked not unlike the young Abner Lincoln, thought
Morbes idly.

“ — tell her,” Emil said quietly, “that the best man
has won. I wish you both a — haha — a happy future!”
With a strangled sob he turned away.

Morbes was so startled by this outburst that he was
unable to summon a bluster to his lips. He turned and
walked out.

Emil knew he had done the right thing. Without
another regret, he filled his pockets with his Mom’s
home-baked cookies, took a last sip of lemonade, and
began to pedal the great generator that powered his
engine. He had mounted a special clock face on the
handlebars before him, and when its hands reached
1937, he depressed the telegraph key. “Now it is

1937 a.d. !” he exclaimed, and looked about him.

The room had not changed considerably, though it
seemed to have become some sort of museum. Emil
found himself surrounded by velvet ropes.

“Here, get off there!” said a man in uniform. He
seized Emil’s arm and dragged him away from the
time engine. “You’re not to touch the exhibits, under-
stand?”

Before the bewildered inventor could explain, he
found himself outside the shop, looking up at a brass
plaque which read, “The Emil Hart Historical
Museum”. He was historical!

Pausing only a moment to marvel at his fame, Emil
strode toward the main street of town, eager to see
the changes time had wrought. The streets, he noticed,
had a new hard surface, and there was not a trace of
manure upon it!

Then he saw them, lined up at the sidewalk. Great
trackless locomotives, just as he had imagined them.
As he watched, two men emerged from a store and
entered one of them. Through its window he could
see one man shovelling coal into the boiler while the
other turned valves. In a moment, the great, chuffing
engine moved off down the street.

His momentary elation dissipated at once, when
Emil turned to look at the shops. There was not a
single new building on Main Street, and though many
had installed large plate glass windows, the facades
above them were faded, dirty and abused. Delmonico’s
Dining Room had become the Eateria, but Carlson’s
Peafowl Feed Store had not even changed its sign.
Emil examined the contents of a clothing store window,
his gorge rising at their dull familiarity. Why weren’t
people attired in seminude costumes of gold, with

scarlet capes? The mannikins showed only women in
the same silly hats and long gowns, men in dark, dull
suits. Worse, the one or two pedestrians he glimpsed
wore overalls of the same cut and hue as his own.

He was thoroughly depressed by the time he reached
the end of the town’s single street and the Public
Library. Despairing of seeing any more wonderful
inventions like the trackless locomotive, Emil made his
way into the familiar building to the tiny room marked
“Science and Technology”. Here at last he might find
respite from the past. Here he might find the future
that seemed to have overlooked his town.

He opened a volume marked “Inventions”. Yes, here
they were: Thomas Elva Addison, the electric light;
Burgess Venn, the flying machine; Gordon Q. Mott,
the televidium — what in the world was that?

He looked it up in the back of the book, and
learned that it was a visual counterpart to the radium.
The latter sent verbal messages over long distances by
means of electrical “waves” in the aether, while the
former did the same for visual messages. He thrilled
to the idea of electrical waves moving about every-
where, in this room, passing right through his body. It
was only because of the intensity of Emil’s meditation
that he failed to notice the figure at his elbow.

“Hullo, Emil.” It was Morbes.

“You used my machine?”

“Yep. I came back to get my bicycle clips and I
seen you was gone. Well, I got to thinking — a feller
could make himself a pile of money outa knowing what
happens in the future. So here I am. Where do they
keep the old newspapers?”

“What are you going to do?” Emil leapt to his feet,
knocking over a chair. Another reader cleared his
throat.

“Read about a few horse races — and some stock
market stuff. I’m rich now, Emil Hart, but I’m gonna
be richer.” Morbes’s grin displayed a row of uneven,
stained teeth.

“You can’t! It’s dishonest! Think of all the little
stockholders who might be ruined by your specula-
tions!” cried Emil. He followed the bully into the
Historial & Periodical room, and seized his arm.
Morbes shook his hand away.

“Leave me alone!” he bellowed. “I’ll do as I see fit!”

“Yes, do leave him alone!” commanded a childish
voice. “I’m trying to read here, and you’re creating a
disturbance.” Emil looked around to confront a boy
of about ten, whose forehead was creased with annoy-
ance beneath the line of his yellow bangs.

Grinning, Morbes said, “Lad, where’s the news-
papers? You know, the waal street journal?”

“I don’t know. All they have in here is this.” The
boy indicated the volume open before him, in which he
had been scribbling with a pen. Emil noticed it was
one of a large matched set that seemed to occupy all
the shelves of the room. There were thousands of
volumes.

“But this will have whatever you’re looking for,”

Page 26

said the boy. “It has a synopsis of everything.”

The set of books was entitled The Universal Synopsis.
“Say!” exclaimed Morbes, illuminated by an un-
characteristic flash of intuition. “If I get rich like I
ought to, there should be something about me in that
book.”

He searched a moment, then came to the table with
volume moray-morbid and seated himself opposite the
boy.

“Here it is! Morbes, Fenton Jr.,” he read at the top
of his lungs.

“Don’t read on!” said Emil. “We’re not meant to
know our own futures.”

“Stuff! Who’s to stop me?”

“I am!” Emil shouted, and snatching up the boy’s
pen, dipped it and lined out the passage Morbes was
about to read.

“Say, why’d you do that? I — ”

With an audible click, Fenton Morbes vanished.
“How interesting!” said the boy. “I was right, then.
This is the only extant copy.”

“What?” Emil stood frozen, gaping at the space his
rival had vacated so abruptly.

“You don’t know what happened? That was the
‘Doppler Effect’, named for myself, Julius Doppler.
Sit down, won’t you, and I’ll explain it to you.”

Emil eased himself into a chair and with effort
directed his gaze toward the serious, freckled face.

“You see. I’ve developed a theory that the future
influences the past. I was fortunate in finding The
Universal Synopsis on which to test it. If this were,
as I believed it to be, the only copy of the only book
in which many items appeared, why then it follows that
I can change the past by merely rewriting it.”

“But how can you change history?” asked Emil,
mystified:

“It’s simple semantics: The word is the thing — at
least after the thing ceases to be. Alter a word in
the future and you alter the thing it once stood for.
Let me show you.”

The boy opened his volume to a page and pointed.
“Now here, I altered the name ‘Sam Franklin’ to ‘John
Franklin’, for example. But if in the future, someone
came along and changed it to — say — ‘Ben’, why he’d
be Ben, don’t you see?”

“No.”

“All right, look here, then.” Julius turned to a map
of the United States. There was the familiar pink
lozenge that was Kiowa, and just above it, the green
hourglass of Minnehaha— but the names were wrong!
“Kiowa” missed its “K”, and Minnehaha” read
“Minnesota” ! And the name at the bottom of the page,
following “The United States of” was not “Columbia”
but some unpronounceable Latin name! The map was
wrong, it had been printed wrong!

“Last week,” said the boy, “I made these changes
in ink. Now this week they are part of the original
book.”

“But how can that be?”

Julius frowned. “I think the past must influence the
future, too,” he said. “But the influence is slower. My
theory is really quite a simple one, but I couldn’t pos-
sibly explain it to you, not all of it. Why, you don’t
even understand e=mc 3 , for Pete’s sake.”

“I understand one thing,” said Emil, leaping up. “I
know that I killed poor Morbes! I am a murderer!”

“Don’t take it so hard,” said the boy. “You wouldn’t
have, if it weren’t for me. In fact, the only reason
you’re a time-traveller is because I wrote the whole
thing in the margin near your name.”

“My name?” Emil was electrified at this reminder
of his fame. “My name . . . Won’t you have a
cookie?”

“Thanks.” The two of them munched Widow Hart’s
cookies and discussed the theory once more, until Emil
was sure he understood. He was not so sure he liked
being at the mercy of the future, but when one con-
sidered it, it was no worse than being at the mercy of
the past. One survived.

When the last cookie was gone, Emil rose and took
his leave. He strolled back to the museum and paid
his admission. After a few moments, he was able to
seize an opportunity when the guard was not looking
and leap upon his time engine. He pedalled furiously
backward to 1 878, and what a glorious feeling mounted
in his breast as he gazed once more on the homely
features of John Franklin.

“I am healthy, wealthy and wise — or shall be
shortly,” Emil told himself. “My rival is gone — I don’t
even remember his name — and I am to be famous!”

After changing to his Sunday clothes, he picked a
nosegay of his Mom’s flowers and set off toward the
Peed house.

Mr. Peed was seated in the porch swing, industriously
polishing his pipe against his nose.

“Hallo, young Hart,” he called out. “What brings
you out this evening, all dressed up like that?”

“I — Emil began, then realized he did not know the
answer. Why had he come to see Mr. and Mrs. Peed?

“Flowers for your wife,” he decided aloud. “From
Mom’s garden.”

“Whose wife?” asked Peed, leaning forward to
accept the nosegay. “I ain’t married, son. I — ”

Peed’s outstretched hand grew transparent. Then
Peed, porch and house vanished with a click.

It was a nightmare! Emil hurried home to check on
his Mom. There was no telling who might click out
of existence next!

He was reassured by the sight of her frail old figure
tottering into his shop with a tray.

“Here, let me take that,” he said, and accepted the
tray from her careworn hands.

“Lemonade and cookies — for me? Gee, you’re good.
Mom!” He bent and kissed her white hair. With a
beatific smile, the old lady tottered back to her kit-
chen, whence came the smell of fresh baking. Fear-
fully, Emil watched until she was out of sight.

Continued on Page 39

Page 27

Sleep, Dreams
and Computers

Dr Christopher Evans

T^wenty years ago, if one wanted to get a dull answer
to an interesting question one would buttonhole a
psychologist and ask him if machines could be said to
possess intelligence. His answer would almost certainly
revolve around two counter-questions, “What do you
mean by Intelligence?” and (worse) “What do you mean
by a Machine?” If one then tried one’s luck with an
engineer, or some other type of scientist concerned with
machines, one might, surprisingly, do a lot better, for
engineers, who know quite a lot about the way the
Universe ticks, tend to have less inhibited imaginations
than psychologists, who, generally speaking, know
practically nothing about anything.

It was, in fact, the mathematician-cum-engineer, the
great and eccentric Englishman Alan Turing, who first
faced up squarely to the problems of machine intelli-
gence in an extremely important paper published in
mind in 1950. This article, “Can a Machine Think?”,
had a profound effect on scientific and philosophical
thought at the time, but the drawing of analogies be-
tween hyper-complex computing machinery and the
beautifully miniaturised circuitry of the brain was
generally frowned upon by psychologists and engineers
alike. The blossoming science of Cybernetics did its best
to close the gap though, and today we find ourselves
exploring these analogies further and further, and find-
ing them increasingly useful. In fact, quite recently, a
striking analogy between complex computer and dream
processes allows one to take an entirely fresh look at
one of the most elusively mysterious aspects of life —
sleep.

research into the nature of sleep — and its inevitable

component, dreams — has been plodding along without
really getting anywhere for a century. Three major
views, or systems of belief, have dominated the scene.
The first states that the most obvious reason for sleep
is that it provides a necessary rest period for the body,
and also for the brain. A “good night’s sleep”, therefore,
should consist of eight hours or so of near-motionless
body, and of solid, dreamless sleep. Alas, physicians
have known for quite some time that sleep is not essen-
tial for bodily rest, and more recently, the electroen-
cephalograph reveals that while the patterning of elec-
trical activity in the brain changes with sleep, there
doesn’t appear to be any less going on. So that’s one
old stager put out to pasture. A much more ancient, but
still shockingly widely-held view is that sleep is a
“near-death” condition when the mind or spirit can
leave the body; dreams are this entity’s adventures
during its sizeable period of freedom. The evidence for
the existence of telepathic and premonitory dreams (air-
craft crashing, uncles dying, etc.) seems to bolster this
view, and J. W. Dunne’s hair-raising book, “An Experi-
ment With Time”, seems to imply that temporal as well
as spatial boundaries collapse during sleep. But the
evidence for telepathy and precognition, once impres-
sive, now looks pretty thin, and leaving the question, of
religious belief aside most people will find this tradi-
tional view of sleeping and dreaming a bit out of touch
with our present-day understanding of the world. The
third classic approach, the psychoanalytic, has had, of
course, a really tremendous effect on Western society,
the keystone being Freud’s magnificent insight as to the
role of unconscious mental processes in our waking and
sleeping life. Dreams, by this theory, represent the burst-

Page 28

ing to the surface, during sleep, of the huge fund of
repressed emotions and desires which are part of Man’s
inevitable psychological being, and yet which Society
demands he deny. The power of the psychoanlytic
approach is obvious to anyone who has spent even a
little time in considered analysis of his own dream con-
tent, but it has, from the start seemed a bit stretched to
cover all the experiences of one’s dream life. Dreams
without great emotional tags, and frequently related to
simple day-to-day happenings are common in every-
one’s experience, and it is difficult, despite the ingenious
notion of a “disguise mechanism” to see these as reflect-
ing suppressed dynamic forces.

TTaving suggested that none of the three venerable
theories of sleeping and dreaming can be con-
sidered to be comprehensive or really satisfactory, we
find ourselves stuck with the amazing fact that we spend
one third of our lives in a weird unconscious state,
apparently merely vegetating, at the mercy of any silent
attacker, and in danger of madness and death if we are
deprived of this non-process for any length of time. (We
can last far, far longer without food than we can with-
out sleep.) We might not have been much the wiser even
now were it not for a snappy observation by Eugene
Aserinsky, a PhD student at the University of Chicago.

This young physiologist had been studying the
curious movements of infants’ eyes during sleep. Con-
vinced that these had some significance, he drew the
attention of the great sleep scientist. Dr. Nathaniel
Kleitman, to the phenomenon, and before long careful
observations on adults revealed that on and off through-
out the night, periods of rapid eye movements (REMs)

took place behind closed lids. It was soon also found
that people woken during these REM-periods reported
dreams, while, if woken at other times, reported
apparently dreamless sleep. Two knock-out facts had
emerged; firstly, an objective, behavioural index of
dreams seemed possible at last; secondly, the amount of
time spent in dreaming turned out to be quite unpre-
dictably large — as much as a quarter of a night’s sleep
in normal adults. A third fact coming from a brilliant
experiment performed by Dr. William Dement of the
Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, rammed the
message home even harder. Dement found that indi-
viduals woken time after time during REM-sleep be-
came mentally disturbed after a few nights, while a
control group, woken for a similar amount of time, but
during non-REM periods, showed no detectable mental
upset. It looked as though the lid was off. The purpose
of sleep was to enable us to dream!

All this happened in 1960. A year later, as an im-
poverished PhD student myself, with, apart from a
number of beautiful girl friends, no visible means of
support, I found my thoughts constantly, almost ob-
sessionally drifting away from the subject of my thesis
(“Some further studies of Pattern Perception using the
technique of Retinal Stabilisation”) and churning over
the staggering new material on sleep and dreams. It
seemed obvious to me that the whole field had been
turned topsy-turvy. Sleep was no longer a rest period,
dreams no longer a mistake. But what then could the
function of dreams be? My first ideas centred around
what I thought of as a “mental defaecation”; all data
absorbed during the day could hardly be stored (I
believed), so perhaps it was held in some kind of short-

Page 29

term memory store until the night, when with sleep
intervening to prevent further input, the day’s memories
could be scanned and the “waste” material rejected.
Dreams, I reasoned — or what we normally talk of as
dreams — take place when the mental defaecation or
sorting process is interrupted by the sleeper waking. The
material is then remembered, and the purpose of the
dream forestalled. I was obsessed with the idea, but
nevertheless realised that an important piece in the
scheme was missing, and try as I would, I couldn’t find
it. Three years later, in the summer of 1964, over a
very long lunch with a colleague, the distinguished
computer engineer Ted Newman, the missing piece fell
into place, and that same afternoon our joint paper,
“Dreaming; analogy from computers” began to take
shape.

/'Computers, as few will need reminding, are very com-
^ plex calculating machines, capable of a very wide
range of tasks, and controlled by sets of programmes —
instructions to the device to use its brain in a particular
way. Now at the moment the range of tasks which com-
puters perform, when compared with the range potential
of the human brain, is small; nevertheless the pro-
grammes need constant revision, updating, de-bugging
and re-classification if the computer is to continue to
perform its tasks with speed and accuracy. The pro-
gramme clearance process is performed first by taking
the computer “off-line” (uncoupling it from the tasks it
is controlling) and then running the old programmes
through, revising them and finally checking them again.
Were this process to take place with the system not off-

line, weird tasks would be performed by the computer,
and, of course, if the process is much delayed computers
become muddled, grossly inaccurate and incapable of
doing their job properly. Furthermore, as we move to
bigger, smarter and more adaptable computers, this
process will become progressively more important, and
will take up more and more time. At the moment it is
performed for the computer by a technician or pro-
grammer; before too long, some form of automatic
programme clearance system, with a regular period set
aside for the job will be vital if the computer is to work
steadily, day in and day out.

remembering that the brain is itself a super-com-
puter, brilliantly fast, with unparalleled storage facilities
and speed of access, and yet undoubtedly controlled by
some programme system, we can see that some process
similar to that described above for man-made machines
should be present. And this, in our view, is what sleep-
ing and dreaming is all about. Sleep itself is the act of
taking and keeping the brain-computer off-line, in order
to allow the re-classification and de-bugging to take
place without interaction with the outside world; dreams
are the actual running-through of the programmes, a
process which the individual is not normally aware of,
unless for some reason he wakes (comes on-line) when
the programme segment in operation is interrupted. If
this happens an attempt is made by the conscious
brain to “interpret” it as a kind of pseudo-event and a
“dream” is remembered. The real core of dreams, of
course, will be odd mixtures of stuff, almost all to do
with recent events and experiences in the life of the
dreamer, thoughts about recent or long-past events.

Page 30

current ideas and obsessions, worries, desires and
wishes, and so on. In fact, anything done in the course
of the day which requires assimilation into the great
mass of existing programmes. The logic of the brain’s
programme system, of course, need not follow the lines
that we feel it ought to. This is important to help in
understanding why the dream-programmes, when inter-
rupted, often seem pretty crazy. It’s just as well, by the
way, that our off-line mechanism is so potent and re-
morseless, for the experience of being fully conscious of
a full-night’s dreaming would be at best boring, at
worst, unthinkably horrific. Anyone who has had a bad
fever and suffered a period in which sleep is persistently
disturbed, and the raw, hard stuff of dreams sampled
intermittently throughout the night will understand
what I mean.

i^kNCE accepted, the computer analogy suggests some
fabulous ideas. Some are a bit too fabulous to put
into orthodox scientific publications as yet, but I can
think of no better market at this stage than new
worlds. Idea One: many gross psychological disorders
are due to a disfunction of the dreaming process; con-
fusion, loss of touch with reality, paranoid symptoms
and persecution complexes are symptomatic of experi-
mentally dream-deprived subjects, and also of schizo-
phrenic states. Idea Two: if the latter is true, then a
crash programme of research should be instituted by
the pharmacological research organisations to develop
a drug which allows the maximum amount of dreaming
to take place dpring sleep. Such a drug might have
dramatic therapeutic effects on chronic schizophrenics.
Idea Three: barbiturate sedation might act by depress-
ing the central nervous system so much that the dream
process itself is inhibited, for at least part of the night.
Thus, though apparently sleeping like logs, nightly bar-
biturate takers could be gradually driving themselves

into a state equivalent to that of chronic sleep depriva-
tion. Idea Four: the hallucinations characteristic of
schizoid conditions and of advanced alcoholic addiction,
might be waking dreams forced into action because of
the disfunction or suppression of normal dreaming at
night. Grim warning for all experimental and joy-riding
takers of hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD; the long-
term effect might be to permanently interfere with the
dream mechanism. Prediction: habitual users of LSD
will sooner or later flip — for good. Idea Five: the more
new material processed in the course of the day, the
more programme revision and updating required. There-
fore, the younger one is, the more dreaming one will
need. Old people who put down very little new material,
and who have in general a very constant environment,
will need substantially less dreaming and thus less
sleep. Should they not be taught to accept without worry
their natural tendency to sleeplessness, and learn to
make use of the bonus hours they have gained? Idea
Six: sleep learning is out. It might work, but only at the
risk of muddling vital programme clearance activities.
Not quite, but very nearly as dangerous as LSD. The
reader might care to amuse himself by adding others to
this by no means exhaustive list.

Whether the computer analogy will stand up to the
test of new experimental discoveries or not is uncertain.
One thing is clear however; we are witnessing a revolu-
tion in scientific thinking which might well have con-
siderable social consequences. Our understanding about
the hidden third of our lives is growing daily, and this
is but one of the ways in which the brain is being in-
duced to give up its secrets. We already have computers
which can read, understand speech, talk and write. Soon
we shall have them learning, thinking and, as I’ve just
pointed out, even dreaming. And what, people occa-
sionally ask, appalled, will computers’ dreams be like?
It’s hard to say, of course. I’ve a feeling, however, that
they’ll be no madder than ours.

NEXT MONTH

Paolozzi: Special Feature
Sladek: Masterson and the Clerks

Jones: The Time Machine
Tate: Mars Pastorale

AND MORE Out July 26th 3s. 6d.

Page 31

Page 32

P. A. Zoline:

1HI Hffl DEAIH
OF THE DNNHISE

1. ONTOLOGY : That branch of metaphysics which
concerns itself with the problems of the nature of
existence or being.

2. Imagine a pale blue morning sky, almost green,
with clouds only at the rims. The earth rolls and the
sun appears to mount, mountains erode, fruits decay,
the Foraminifera adds another chamber to its shell,
babies’ fingernails grow as does the hair of the dead in
their graves, and in egg timers the sands fall and the
eggs cook on.

3. Sarah Boyle thinks of her nose as too large, though
several men have cherished it. The nose is generous
and performs a well calculated geometric curve, at the
arch of which the skin is drawn very tight and a faint
whiteness of bone can be seen showing through, it has
much the same architectural tension and sense of
mathematical calculation as the day after Thanks-
giving breastbone on the carcass of turkey; her maiden
name was Sloss, mixed German, English and Irish
descent; in grade school she was very bad at playing
softball and, besides being chosen last for the team,
was always made to play center field, no one could
ever hit to center field; she loves music best of all the
arts, and of music, Bach, J.S.; she lives in California,
though she grew up in Boston and Toledo.

4 . BREAKFAST TIME AT THE BOYLE’S
HOUSE ON LA FLORIDA STREET, ALAMEDA,
CALIFORNIA, THE CHILDREN DEMAND
SUGAR FROSTED FLAKES.

With some reluctance Sarah Boyle dishes out Sugar

Frosted Flakes to her children, already hearing the
decay set in upon the little milk white teeth, the bony
whine of the dentist’s drill. The dentist is a short,
gentle man with a moustache who sometimes reminds
Sarah of an uncle who lives in Ohio. One bowl per
child.

5 . If one can imagine it considered as an abstract
object, by members of a totally separate culture, one
can see that the cereal box might seem a beautiful
thing. The solid rectangle is neatly joined and classical
in proportions, on it are squandered wealths of richest
colours, virgin blues, crimsons, dense ochres, precious
pigments once reserved for sacred paintings and as
cosmetics for the blind faces of marble gods. Giant
size. Net Weight 16 ounces, 250 grams. “They’re
tigeriffic!” says Tony the Tiger. The box blatts pro-
mises: Energy, Nature’s Own Goodness, an endless
pubescence. On its back is a mask of William Shake-
speare to be cut out, folded, worn by thousands of
tiny Shakespeares in Kansas City, Detroit, Tuscon, San
Diego, Tampa. He appears at once more kindly and
somewhat more vacant that we are used to seeing
him. Two or more of the children lay claim to the
mask, but Sarah puts off that Solomon’s decision until
such time as the box is empty.

6. A notice in orange flourishes states that a Surprise
Gift is to be found somewhere in the package, nestled
amongst the golden flakes. So far it has not been un-
earthed, and the children request more cereal than
they wish to eat, great yellow heaps of it, to hurry
the discovery. Even so, at the end of the meal, some
layers of flakes remain in the box and the Gift must

Page 33

still be among them.

7. There is even a Special Offer of a secret member-
ship, code and magic ring; these to be obtained by
sending in the box top with 50c.

8 . Three offers on one cereal box. To Sarah Boyle
this seems to be oversell. Perhaps something is terribly
wrong with the cereal and it must be sold quickly, got
off the shelves before the news breaks. Perhaps it
causes a special, cruel Cancer in little children. As
Sarah Boyle collects the bowls printed with bunnies and
baseball statistics, still slopping half full of milk and
wilted flakes, she imagines in her mind’s eye the head-
lines, “Nation’s Small Fry Stricken, Fate’s Finger Sugar
Coated, Lethal Sweetness Socks Tots”.

9. Sarah Boyle is a vivacious and intelligent young
wife and mother, educated at a fine Eastern college,
proud of her growing family which keeps her busy and
happy around the house.

10. BIRTHDAY.

Today is the birthday of one of the children. There
will be a party in the late afternoon.

11. CLEANING UP THE HOUSE. ONE.

Cleaning up the kitchen. Sarah Boyle puts the bowls,

plates, glasses and silverware into the sink. She scrubs
at the stickiness on the yellow-marbled formica table
with a blue synthetic sponge, a special blue which we
shall see again. There are marks of children’s hands
in various sizes printed with sugar and grime on all
the table’s surfaces. The marks catch the light, they
appear and disappear according to the position of the
observing eye. The floor sweepings include a triangular
half of toast spread with grape jelly, bobby pins, a
green band-aid, flakes, a doll’s eye, dust, dog’s hair and
a button.

12. Until we reach the statistically likely planet and
begin to converse with whatever green-faced, teleport-
ing denizens thereof — considering only this shrunk and
communication-ravaged world — can we any more pos-
tulate a separate culture? Viewing the metastasis of
Western Culture it seems progressively less likely.
Sarah Boyle imagines a whole world which has become
like California, all topographical imperfections sanded
away with the sweet smelling burr of the plastic sur-
geon’s cosmetic polisher; a world populace dieting,
leisured, similar in pink and mauve hair and rhinestone
shades. A land Cunt Pink and Avocado Green,
brassiered and girdled by monstrous complexities of
Super Highways, a California endless and unceasing,
embracing and transforming the entire globe, Califor-
nia, California!

13. INSERT ONE. ON ENTROPY.

ENTROPY : A quantity introduced in the first

place to facilitate the calculations, and to give clear
expressions to the results of thermodynamics. Changes
of entropy can be calculated only for a reversible
process, and may then be defined as the ratio of the
amount of heat taken up to the absolute temperature
at which the heat is absorbed. Entropy changes for
actual irreversible processes are calculated by postu-
lating equivalent theoretical reversible changes. The
entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of dis-
order. The total entropy of any isolated system can
never decrease in any change; it must either increase
(irreversible process) or remain constant (reversible
process). The total entropy of the Universe therefore
is increasing, tending towards a maximum, correspond-
ing to complete disorder of the particles in it (assuming
that it may be regarded as an isolated system). See
heat death of the Universe.

14. CLEANING UP THE HOUSE. TWO.

Washing the baby’s diapers. Sarah Boyle writes notes

to herself all over the house; a mazed wild script larded
with arrows, diagrams, pictures; graffiti on every avail-
able surface in a desperate/ heroic attempt to index,
record, bluff, invoke, order and placate. On the fluted
and flowered white plastic lid of the diaper bin she
has written in Blushing Pink Nitetime lipstick a phrase
to ward off fumey ammoniac despair. “The nitrogen
cycle is the vital round of organic and inorganic ex-
change on earth. The sweet breath of the Universe.”
On the wall by the washing machine are Yin and Yang
signs, mandalas, and the words, “Many young wives
feel trapped. It is a contemporary sociological pheno-
menon which may be explained in part by a gap be-
tween changing living patterns and the accommodation
of social services to these patterns”. Over the stove she
had written “Help, Help, Help, Help, Help”.

15. Sometimes she numbers or letters the things in
a room, writing the assigned character on each object.
There are 819 separate moveable objects in the living
room, counting books. Sometimes she labels objects
with their names, or with false names, thus on her
bureau the hair brush is labeled HAIR BRUSH, the
cologne, COLOGNE, the hand cream, CAT. She is
passionately fond of children’s dictionaries, encyclo-
paedias, ABCs and all reference books, transfixed and
comforted at their simulacra of a complete listing and
ordering.

16. On the door of a bedroom are written two defini-
tions from reference books, “GOD: An object of
worship”; “HOMEOSTASIS: Maintenance of con-
stancy of internal environment”.

17. Sarah Boyle washes the diapers, washes the
linen. Oh Saint Veronica, changes the sheets on the
baby’s crib. She begins to put away some of the toys,
stepping over and around the organizations of play-
things which still seem inhabited. There are various

Page 34

vehicles, and articles of medicine, domesticity and war;
whole zoos of stuffed animals, bruised and odorous
with years of love; hundreds of small figures, plastic
animals, cowboys, cars, spacemen, with which the
children make sub and supra worlds in their play. One
of Sarah’s favourite toys is the Baba, the wooden
Russian doll which, opened, reveals a smaller but
otherwise identical doll which opens to reveal, etc., a
lesson in infinity at least to the number of seven dolls.

18 . Sarah Boyle’s mother has been dead for two
years. Sarah Boyle thinks of music as the formal
articulation of the passage of time, and of Bach as the
most poignant rendering of this. Her eyes are some-
times the colour of the aforementioned kitchen sponge.
Her hair is natural spaniel brown; months ago on an
hysterical day she dyed it red, so now it is two-toned
with a stripe in the middle, like the painted walls of
slum buildings or old schools.

19 . INSERT TWO. THE HEAT DEATH OF
UNIVERSE.

The second law of thermodynamics can be interpre-
ted to mean that the ENTROPY of a closed system
tends toward a maximum and that its available
ENERGY tends toward a minimum. It has been held
that the Universe constitutes a thermodynamically
closed system, and if this were true it would mean
that a time must finally come when the Universe “un-
winds” itself, no energy being available for use. This
state is referred to as the “heat death of the Universe”.
It is by no means certain, however, that the Universe
can be considered as a closed system in this sense.

20 . Sarah Boyle pours out a Coke from the refrigera-
tor and lights a cigarette. The coldness and sweetness
of the thick brown liquid make her throat ache and
her teeth sting briefly, sweet juice of my youth, her
eyes glass with the carbonation, she thinks of the Heat
Death of the Universe. A logarithmic of those late
summer days, endless as the Irish serpent twisting
through jewelled manuscripts forever, tail in mouth,
the heat pressing, bloating, doing violence. The Los
Angeles sky becomes so filled and bleached with
detritus that it loses all colour and silvers like a mirror,
reflecting back the fricasseeing earth. Everything be-
coming warmer and warmer, each particle of matter
becoming more agitated, more excited until the bonds
shatter, the glues fail, the deodorants lose their seals.
She imagines the whole of New York City melting like
a Dali into a great chocolate mass, a great soup, the
Great Soup of New York.

21 . CLEANING UP THE HOUSE. THREE.

Beds made. Vacuuming the hall, a carpet of faded

flowers, vines and leaves which endlessly wind and
twist into each other in a fevered and permanent
ecstasy. Suddenly the vacuum blows instead of sucks,
spewing marbles, dolls’ eyes, dust, crackers. An old

trick. “Oh my god,” says Sarah. The baby yells on
cue for attention /changing /food. Sarah kicks the
vacuum cleaner and it retches and begins working
again.

22. AT LUNCH ONLY ONE GLASS OF MILK
IS SPILLED.

At lunch only one glass of milk is spilled.

23. The plants need watering. Geranium, Hyacinth,
Lavender, Avocado, Cyclamen. Feed the fish, happy
fish with china castles and mermaids in the bowl. The
turtle looks more and more unwell and is probably
dying.

24. Sarah Boyle’s blue eyes, how blue? Bluer far
and of a different quality than the Nature metaphors
which were both engine and fuel to so much of pre-
cedant literature. A fine, modern, acid, synthetic blue;
the shiny cerulean of the skies on postcards sent from
lush subtropics, the natives grinning ivory ambivalent
grins in their dark faces; the promising, fat, unnatural
blue of the heavy tranquillizer capsule; the cool, mean
blue of that fake kitchen sponge; the deepest, most
unbelievable azure of the tiled and mossless interiors
of California swimming pools. The chemists in their
kitchens cooked, cooled and distilled this blue from
thousands of colourless and wonderfully constructed
crystals, each one unique and nonpareil; and now that
colour, hisses, bubbles, burns in Sarah’s eyes.

25. INSERT THREE. ON LIGHT.

LIGHT : Name given to the agency by means of
which a viewed object influences the observer’s eyes.
Consists of electro-magnetic radiation within the wave-
length range 4 x 10- 5 cm. to 7 x 10- 5 cm. approxi-
mately; variations in the wave-length produce different
sensations in the eye, corresponding to different colours.
See colour vision.

26. LIGHT AND CLEANING THE LIVING
ROOM.

All the objects (819) and surfaces in the living room
are dusty, grey common dust as though this were the
den of a giant, moulting mouse. Suddenly quantities
of waves or particles of very strong sunlight speed in
through the window, and everything incandesces,
multiple rainbows. Poised in what has become a solid
cube of light, like an ancient insect trapped in amber,
Sarah Boyle realizes that the dust is indeed the most
beautiful stuff in the room, a manna for the eyes.
Duchamp, that father of thought, has set with fixative
some dust which fell on one of his sculptures, count-
ing it as part of the work. “That way madness lies, says
Sarah,” says Sarah. The thought of ordering a house-
hold on Dada principles balloons again. All the rooms
would fill up with objects, newspapers and magazines
would compost, the potatoes in the rack, the canned
green beans in the garbage can would take new heart

Page 35

and come to life again, reaching out green shoots
towards the sun. The plants would grow wild and
wind into a jungle around the house, splitting plaster,
tearing shingles, the garden would enter in at the door.
The goldfish would die, the birds would die, we’d have
them stuffed; the dog would die from lack of care,
and probably the children — all stuffed and sitting
around the house, covered with dust.

27. INSERT FOUR. DADA.

DADA (Fr., hobby-horse) was a nihilistic precursor
of Surrealism, invented in Zurich during World War
I, a product of hysteria and shock lasting from about
1915 to 1922. It was deliberately anti-art and anti-
sense, intended to outrage and scandalize, and its most
characteristic production was the reproduction of the
Mona Lisa decorated with a moustache and the obscene
caption LHOOQ (read : elle a chaud au cul) “by”
Duchamp. Other manifestations included Arp’s collages
of coloured paper cut out at random and shuffled,
ready-made objects such as the bottle drier and the
bicycle wheel “signed” by Duchamp, Picabia’s draw-
ings of bits of machinery with incongruous titles,
incoherent poetry, a lecture given by 38 lecturers in
unison, and an exhibition in Cologne in 1920, held in
an annexe to a caf 6 lavatory, at which a chopper was
provided for spectators to smash the exhibits with —
which they did.

28 . TIME PIECES AND OTHER MEASURING
DEVICES.

In the Boyle house there are four clocks; three*
watches (one a Mickey Mouse watch which does not
work); two calendars and two engagement books;
three rulers, a yard stick; a measuring cup; a set of red
plastic measuring spoons which includes a tablespoon,
a teaspoon, a one-half teaspoon, one-fourth teaspoon
and one-eighth teaspoon; an egg timer; an oral ther-
mometer and a rectal thermometer; a Boy Scout com-
pass; a barometer in the shape of a house, in and out
of which an old woman and an old man chase each
other forever without fulfilment; a bathroom scale; an
infant scale; a tape measure which can be pulled out
of a stuffed felt strawberry; a wall on which the
children’s heights are marked; a metronome.

29 . Sarah Boyle finds a new line in her face after
lunch while cleaning the bathroom. It is as yet barely
visible, running from the midpoint of her forehead to
the bridge of her nose. By inward curling of her eye-
brows she can etch it clearly as it will come to appear
in the future. She marks another mark on the wall where
she has drawn out a scoring area. Face Lines and
Other Intimations of Mortality, the heading says. There
are thirty-two marks, counting this latest one.

30 . Sarah Boyle is a vivacious and witty young wife
and mother, educated at a fine Eastern college, proud
of her growing family which keeps her happy and

busy around the house, involved in many hobbies and
community activities, and only occasionally given to
obsessions concerning Time / Entropy / Chaos and
Death.

31. Sarah Boyle is never quite sure how many child-
ren she has.

32 . Sarah thinks from time to time; Sarah is
occasionally visited with this thought; at times this
thought comes upon Sarah, that there are things to
be hoped for, accomplishments to be desired beyond
the mere reproductions, mirror reproduction of one’s
kind. The babies. Lying in bed at night sometimes
the memory of the act of birth, always the hue and
texture of red plush theatre seats, washes up; the
rending which always, at a certain intensity of pain,
slipped into landscapes, the sweet breath of the sweat-
ing nurse. The wooden Russian doll has bright, per-
fectly round red spots on her cheeks, she splits in the
centre to reveal a doll smaller but in all other respects
identical with round bright red spots on her cheeks, etc.

33 . How fortunate for the species, Sarah muses or
is mused, that children are as ingratiating as we know
them. Otherwise they would soon be salted off for
the leeches they are, and the race would extinguish
itself in a fair sweet flowering, the last generations’
massive achievement in the arts and pursuits of high
civilization. The finest women would have their tubes
tied off at the age of twelve, or perhaps refrain
altogether from the Act of Love? All interests would
be bent to a refining and perfecting of each febrile
sense, each fluid hour, with no more cowardly invest-
ment in immortality via the patchy and too often dis-
appointing vegetables of one’s own womb.

34 . INSERT FIVE. LOVE.

LOVE: a typical sentiment involving fondness for,
or attachment to, an object, the idea of which is
emotionally coloured whenever it arises in the mind,
and capable, as Shand has pointed out, of evoking
any one of a whole gamut of primary emotions, accord-
ing to the situation in which the object is placed, or
represented; often, and by psychoanalysts always, used
in the sense of sex-love or even lust (q.v.).

35 . Sarah Boyle has at times felt a unity with her
body, at other times a complete separation. The mind/
body duality considered. The time/ space duality con-
sidered. The male/ female duality considered. The
matter/energy duality considered. Sometimes, at ex-
tremes, her Body seems to her an animal on a leash,
taken for walks in the park by her Mind. The lamp
posts of experience. Her arms are lightly freckled,
and when she gets very tired the places under her eyes
become violet.

36 . Housework is never completed, the chaos always
lurks ready to encroach on any area left unweeded.

Page 36

a jungle filled with dirty pans and the roaring of giant
stuffed toy animals suddenly turned savage. Terrible
glass eyes.

37. SHOPPING FOR THE BIRTHDAY CAKE.

Shopping in the supermarket with the baby in front
of the cart and a larger child holding on. The light
from the ice cube tray shaped fluorescent lights is
mixed blue and pink and brighter, colder, and cheaper
than daylight. The doors swing open just as you reach
out your hand for them, Tantalus, moving with a
ghastly quiet swing. Hot dogs for the party. Potato
chips, gum drops, a paper table cloth with birthday
designs, hot dog buns, catsup, mustard, picalilli, bal-
loons, instant coffee Continental style, dog food, frozen
peas, ice cream, frozen lima beans, frozen broccoli in
butter sauce, paper birthday hats, paper napkins in
three colours, a box of Sugar Frosted Flakes with a
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart mask on the back, bread,
pizza mix. The notes of a just graspable music filter
through the giant store, for the most part by-passing
the brain and acting directly on the liver, blood and
lymph. The air is delicately scented with aluminum.
Half and half cream, tea bags, bacon, sandwich meat,
strawberry jam. Sarah is in front of the shelves of
cleaning products now, and the baby is beginning to
whine. Around her are whole libraries of objects,
offering themselves. Some of that same old hysteria
that had incarnadined her hair rises up again, and she
does not refuse it. There is one moment when she can
choose direction, like standing on a chalk drawn X,
a hot cross bun, and she does not choose calm and
measure. Sarah Boyle begins to pick out, methodically,
deliberately and with a careful ecstasy, one of every
cleaning product which the store sells. Window
Cleaner, Glass Cleaner, Brass Polish, Silver Polish,
Steel Wool, eighteen different brands of Detergent,
Disinfectant, Toilet Cleanser, Water Softener, Fabric
Softener, Drain Cleanser, Spot Remover, Floor Wax,
Furniture Wax, Car Wax, Carpet Shampoo, Dog
Shampoo, Shampoo for people with dry, oily and
normal hair, for people with dandruff, for people with
grey hair. Tooth Paste, Tooth Powder, Denture
Cleaner, Deodorants, Antiperspirants, Antiseptics,
Soaps, Cleansers, Abrasives, Oven Cleansers, Makeup
Removers. When the same products appear in different
sizes Sarah takes one of each size. For some products
she accumulates whole little families of containers:
a giant Father bottle of shampoo, a Mother bottle, an
Older Sister bottle just smaller than the Mother bottle,
and a very tiny Baby Brother bottle. Sarah fills three
shopping carts and has to have help wheeling them all
down the aisles. At the check-out counter her laughter
and hysteria keep threatening to overflow as the pale
blonde clerk with no eyebrows like the Mona Lisa
pretends normality and disinterest. The bill comes to
$57.53 and Sarah has to write a check. Driving home,
the baby strapped in the drive-a-cot and the paper
bags bulging in the back seat, she cries.

38. BEFORE THE PARTY.

Mrs. David Boyle, mother-in-law of Sarah Boyle, is
coming to the party of her grandchild. She brings a
toy, a yellow wooden duck on a string, made in
Austria; the duck quacks as it is pulled along the floor.
Sarah is filling paper cups with gum drops and choco-
lates, and Mrs. David Boyle sits at the kitchen table
and talks to her. She is talking about several things,
she is talking about her garden which is flourishing
except for a plague of rare black beetles, thought to
have come from Hong Kong, which are undermining
some of the most delicate growths at the roots, and
feasting on the leaves of other plants. She is talking
about a sale of household linens which she plans to
attend on the following Tuesday. She is talking about
her neighbour who has Cancer and is wasting away.
The neighbour is a Catholic woman who had never
had a day’s illness in her life until the Cancer struck,
and now she is, apparently, failing with dizzying speed.
The doctor says her body’s chaos, chaos, cells running
wild all over, says Mrs. David Boyle. When I visited
her she hardly knew me, can hardly speak, can’t keep
herself clean, says Mrs. David Boyle.

39. Sometimes Sarah can hardly remember how
many cute, chubby little children she has.

40. When she used to stand out in center field far
away from the other players, she used to make up
songs and sing them to herself.

41. She thinks of the end of the world by ice.

42. She thinks of the end of the world by water.

43. She thinks of the end of the world by nuclear
war.

44. There must be more than this, Sarah Boyle thinks,
from time to time. What could one do to justify one’s
passage? Or less ambitiously, to change, even in the
motion of the smallest mote, the course and circulation
of the world? Sometimes Sarah’s dreams are of heroic
girth, a new symphony using laboratories of machinery
and all invented instruments, at once giant in scope
and intelligible to all, to heal the bloody breach; a series
of paintings which would transfigure and astonish and
calm the frenzied art world in its panting race; a new
novel that would refurbish language. Sometimes she
considers the mystical, the streaky and random, and it
seems that one change, no matter how small, would be
enough. Turtles are supposed to live for many years.
To carve a name, date and perhaps a word of hope
upon a turtle’s shell, then set him free to wend the
world, surely this one act might cancel out absurdity.?

45. Mrs. David Boyle has a faint moustache, like
Duchamp’s Mona Lisa.

Page 37

46. THE BIRTHDAY PARTY.

Many children, dressed in pastels, sit around the
long table. They are exhausted and overexcited from
games fiercely played, some are flushed and wet, others
unnaturally pale. This general agitation, and the paper
party hats they wear, combine to make them appear a
dinner part of of debauched midgets. It is time for the
cake. A huge chocolate cake in the shape of a rocket
and launching pad and covered with blue and pink
icing is carried in. In the hush the birthday child begins
to cry. He stops crying, makes a wish and blows out
the candles.

47. One child will not eat hot dogs, ice cream or
cake, and asks for cereal. Sarah pours him out a bowl
of Sugar Frosted Flakes, and a moment later he chokes.
Sarah pounds him on the back and out spits a tiny
green plastic snake with red glass eyes, the Surprise
Gift. All the children want it.

48. AFTER THE PARTY THE CHILDREN ARE
PUT TO BED.

Bath time. Observing the nakedness of children, pink
and slippery as seals, squealing as seals, now the splash-
ing, grunting and smacking of cherry flesh on raspberry
flesh reverberate in the pearl tiled steamy cubicle. The
nakedness of children is so much more absolute than
that of the mature. No musky curling hair to indicate
the target points, no knobbly clutch of plane and fat
and curvature to ennoble this prince of beasts. All
well fed naked children appear edible, Sarah’s teeth
hum in her head with memory of bloody feastings,
prehistory. Young humans appear too like the young
of other species for smugness, and the comparison is
not even in their favour, they are much the most peeled
and unsupple of those young. Such pinkness, such utter
nuded pinkness; the orifices neatly incised, rimmed
with a slightly deeper rose, the incessent demands for
breast, time, milks of many sorts.

49. INSERT SIX. WEINER ON ENTROPY.

In Gibbs’ Universe order is least probable, chaos
most probable. But while the Universe as a whole, if
indeed there is a whole Universe, tends to run down,
there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed
to that of the Universe at large and in which there is
a limited and temporary tendency for organization to
increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves.

50. Sarah Boyle imagines, in her mind’s eye, clean-
ing and ordering the whole world, even the Universe.
Filling the great spaces of Space with a marvellous
sweet smelling, deep cleansing foam. Deodorizing rank
caves and volcanoes. Scrubbing rocks.

51. INSERT SEVEN. TURTLES.

Many different species of carnivorous Turtles live
in the fresh waters of the tropical and temperate zones
of various continents. Most Northerly of the European

Turtles (extending as far as Holland and Lithuania) is
the European Pond Turtle ( Emys orbicularis). It is
from 8 to 10 inches long and may live a hundred years.

52. CLEANING UP AFTER THE PARTY.

Sarah is cleaning up after the party. Gum drops

and melted ice cream surge off paper plates, making
holes in the paper tablecloth through the printed roses.
A fly has died a splendid death in a pool of straw-
berry ice cream. Wet jelly beans stain all they touch,
finally becoming themselves colourless, opaque white
like flocks of tamed or sleeping maggots. Plastic favours
mount half-eaten pieces of blue cake. Strewn about are
thin strips of fortune papers from the Japanese poppers.
Upon them are printed strangely assorted phrases
selected by apparently unilingual Japanese. Crowds of
delicate yellow people spending great chunks of their
lives in producing these most ephemeral of objects,
and inscribing thousands of fine papers with absurd
and incomprehensible messages. “The very hairs of
your head are all numbered,” reads one. Most of the
balloons have popped. Someone has planted a hot dog
in the daffodil pot. A few of the helium balloons have
escaped their owners and now ride the ceiling. Another
fortune paper reads, “Emperor’s horses meet death
worse, numbers, numbers.”

53. She is very tired, violet under the eyes, mauve
beneath the eyes. Her uncle in Ohio used to get the
same marks under his eyes. She goes to the kitchen
to lay the table for tomorrow’s breakfast, then she
sees that in the turtle’s bowl the turtle is floating, still,
on the surface of the water. Sarah Boyle pokes at it
with a pencil but it does not move. She stands for
several minutes looking at the dead turtle on the sur-
face of the water. She is crying again.

54. She begins to cry. She goes to the refrigerator
and takes out a carton of eggs, white eggs, extra large.
She throws them one by one on to the kitchen floor
which is patterned with strawberries in squares. They
break beautifully. There is a Secret Society of Dentists,
all moustached, with Special Code and Magic Rings.
She begins to cry. She takes up three bunny dishes
and throws them against the refrigerator, they shatter,
and then the floor is covered with shards, chunks of
partial bunnies, an ear, an eye here, a paw; Stockton,
California, Acton, California, Chico, California, Red-
ding, California, Glen Ellen, California, Cadix, Cali-
fornia, Angels Camp, California, Half Moon Bay. The
total ENTROPY of the Universe therefore is increas-
ing, tending towards a maximum, corresponding to
complete disorder of the particles in it. She is crying,
her mouth is open. She throws a jar of grape jelly and
it smashes the window over the sink. Her eyes are
blue. She begins to open her mouth. It has been held
that the Universe constitutes a thermodynamically
closed system, and if this were true it would mean that
a time must finally come when the Universe “unwinds”

Page 38

itself, no energy being available for use. This state is
referred to as the “heat death of the Universe”. Sarah
Boyle begins to cry. She throws a jar of strawberry
jam against the stove, enamel chips off and the stove
begins to bleed. Bach had twenty children, how many
children has Sarah Boyle? Her mouth is open. Her
mouth is opening. She turns on the water and fills the
sinks with detergent. She writes on the kitchen wall,
“William Shakespeare has Cancer and lives in Cali-
fornia”. She writes, “Sugar Frosted Flakes are the
Food of the Gods”. The water foams up in the sink,
overflowing, bubbling on to the strawberry floor.
She is about to begin to cry. Her mouth is opening. She

is crying. She cries. How can one ever tell whether
there are one or many fish? She begins to break
glasses and dishes, she throws cups and cooking pots
and jars of food which shatter and break and spread
over the kitchen. The sand keeps falling, very quietly,
in the egg timer. The old man and woman in the
barometer never catch each other. She picks up eggs
and throws them into the air. She begins to cry. She
opens her mouth. The eggs arch slowly through the
kitchen, like a baseball, hit high against the spring
sky, seen from far away. They go higher and higher
in the stillness, hesitate at the zenith, then begin to
fall away slowly, slowly, through the fine, clear air.

1937 AD! Continued from page 27

TTe cornered Julius in the library and demanded an
explanation.

“Of what?” asked the youngster. “An explanation of
what?”

“I’m not sure, but I think the Peeds had a daughter,
and I think I was in love with her. Now she’s gone,
and they’re gone — have you been e t'ting again?”

“You did it yourself, pal. When you crossed out the
reference to Fenton what’s-his-name, you also des-
troyed the only existing reference to the girl, Maud.
She was his wife. You got any more cookies?”

“You mean I’d have lost her in any case?”

“Uh-huh.” With his mouth full of the widow’s
cookies, the boy explained. Destroying Maud had des-
troyed her parents, their parents, and so on, back to
the time when some relative was famous enough to
have appeared in The Universal Synopsis. It was diffi-
cult for Emil to follow, for not only did the boy speak
with his mouth full, but neither he nor Emil could
clearly remember who it was they were discussing. As
Julius said, it was all very mythical — or perhaps he
said mystical.

At last, Emil was brought to understand he had lost
the only girl he’d ever loved. His grief was superb.

He knew it was all his own fault. If only he had not
wanted to glimpse the golden towers and battlements
of the future! If only he had been content! His sin
was pride, pride that goeth before (or, according to
Julius, cometh after) a great fall.

What had she been like, this girl he’d lost? He had
some faint reminiscence of her lovely eyes being hazel
— or else her hair — or was it her name? In despair,
he put his head on his arms and wept unashamedly.

“Here, read this,” said Julius Doppler. “It’ll cheer
you up.”.

It was the volume hart-haruspex, and in it, Emil
read:

Hart, Emil (I860-?), inventor of the time engine

and only successful time traveller. Leaving 1878,

he journeyed into 1937, where, in a public
library, he met Julius Doppler (q.v.), who ex-
plained to him the famed “Doppler Effect” — the
influence of the future upon the past. After several
blunders, Hart finally read his own story in The
Universal Synopsis (q.v.), and realized as he did
so that, had he read it earlier, he might have
avoided making a costly mistake, the deletion of
some probably mythical woman from history. As
he realized all this. Hart is reported to have said,
“Thunderation ! Why didn’t I think of this
before?”

“Thunderation!” said Emil, smiting his forehead
“Why didn’t I think of this before?”

He referred not to his past mistakes, however, but
to his successes yet to come. Borrowing the pen from
Julius, who had just changed the peafowl to a chicken,
Emil wrote in the margin the following:

Nonplussed, the stout-hearted inventor re-created
his girl. Hazel Peid, from memory, adding her to
his life story. After a brief courtship, they married.
The plucky Hart went on to become healthy,
wealthy and wise.

After a moment of thought, he added:

And nothing anyone writes here in the future will
ever make it otherwise.

Then, giving Julius the last cookie, he departed.

She was there in his shop, the lovely Hazel Peid
of the hazel hair and eyes — just as he remembered
her. Going upon one knee, and tossing back his unruly
lock, Emil said, “Miss Peid, will you be my wife?”
“Oh, yes!” she exclaimed, clapping her small, well-
formed hands together.

“This calls for a celebration,” said Mom, tottering
in with a tray. “Won’t you have some lemonade and
cookies?”

Emil and his fiancee embraced, while above them,
the rheumy eyes of Ben Franklin seemed to smile a
blessing.

Page 39

NOT SO. .

certain

DAVID MASSON

T he shm’qh, or Sshm-qh, or Sshmeqh (which sounds
like “shmukh”, only breathier) were getting more
unsatisfactory every day. In private, Jacobs cursed
them and the whole business of his mission. All had
seemed auspicious at first. Here on this planet was
an intelligent race with a learnable language, and all
things considered, an almost pronounceable one. The
labour of establishing communication had at last begun
to bear fruit. Questions could be asked, co-operation
could be sought, explanations could be given, propa-
ganda could be made. The human interpreters with
the expedition had mastered enough of the language
to be able to express almost anything the administra-
tion demanded of them, and to follow most of what
was said; eventually most of the crew could get along
in varying degrees, and Jacobs became himself quite
fluent. It was rather like conversing with moths in
moth language; no vowels to speak of — except that
now and again a surprising clatter of vowelage broke
out among the Shm’qh themselves, no one knew why;
a lot of feathery, sneezy consonants that no one could
quite master. Yet the Shm’qh had tongues, mouths,
even teeth (of sorts), a soft enfolding muscle that took
the place of lips, and something that passed for a voice-
box and lungs. It had proved possible to imitate their
words near enough to make oneself understood, with
occasional repetitions. The grammar was very unusual,
but could be digested after practice. The absence of
plurals, except in what passed for pronouns, was a
stumbling-block, but one that could be got round.

The natives seemed friendly and surprisingly un-
alarmed by the human invaders, who were careful to
avoid any behaviour that might have been construed
as a sign of desire to dominate, They were not incon-
veniently curious. They had no machinery, but their
intelligence was evidently high. They had everything
in abundance on their planet : perhaps their intelligence

was insufficiently exercised. They were in some com-
petition with the non-intelligent species, but not seri-
ously menaced by disease, parasites, plant or animal
predators, or starvation. They did not seem to be trying
to conceal anything or deceive the humans. Yet their
co-operation seemed to reach a reserve somewhere.
There was a barrier, an evasion.

The interpreter of a team would ask “Can we return
this way?” ( Tsh’ny Ih’ly wh'ng ’zhny’ bv'w w'gh’pf ’w,
literally “Pass shown reverse open eh? self-and-others
relevance”: it had been established conclusively that
“open” was equivalent to “possible” and “shut” to
“impossible”, and the order of words in a sentence
was now well understood.) The Shm’qh spoken to
would answer with a sort of sneeze meaning “No”
(shny’wh) and the party would go home the long way
round. Weeks later it would be discovered that the
track avoided, though difficult, was by no means im-
passable to either species; yet no evidence was ever
unearthed of secret activity there which the Shm’qh
might have wished to keep inviolate. A man fell down
a gully once and when brought back, bones broken,
developed a type of pneumonia which did not respond
to drugs. “Will he live?” ( ny’p’lw gh’qhty bv’w 'pf’lh
V, literally “activity continuation eh? the-other rele-
vance’) produced a slow “Shnyauwh” which was taken
to mean “No”, since the rare vowels apparently meant
nothing. The man recovered in a fortnight, after a
crisis. Need the Shm’qh have been so brutally pessi-
mistic? In the middle of a native feast two men pass-
ing humping an unwieldy generator were much
annoyed to hear one of the two nearest natives say
to the other, quite loudly and with amusement-posture
slanted in their direction, "Tyiwhdyim ipf”, which
means “Folly the-others” (that is, “They’re crazy!”).
The posture, the equivalent of a broad grin, involved
the wide whipping of the tail, the rocking up and down

Page 40

on out-bent elbows, and the spread of the ear-tufts,
with the head turned towards them. Perhaps this was
friendly guying, but ty’whdy’m was an exceedingly
offensive word, as Scatterthwaite had discovered to
his cost when he had used it on a native who got too
close to a high-tension coil. An abject ceremonial
apology had had to be made by Scatterthwaite and
Jacobs to the head official and the offended native,
before all the tribe, to avert a complete withdrawal of
all contact. All the crew were warned never to use the
word again. That was three months before the feast
incident.

T^inally, when Jacobs asked if his mission might
•*- take back to Earth a few native ornaments, utensils,
and cultivated plants (without mentioning the elaborate
decontamination and quarantine that these, and the
team, would have to undergo before release), he met
with a flat No, delivered with the Shm’qh equivalent
of an inscrutable smile, the tail switching gently, the
ear-tufts slightly displayed, and the elbows spread out.
Jacobs tried persuasion as eloquent as he could make
it. All to no effect, except that “Shny’wh” turned to
“Shnyiwh” and finally to “Shnyeewh”, and the elbows
spread wider and wider.

The doctor doubled as ethnologist because of his
experience in physiographic measurements. He was un-
able to help. “Why don’t you try Jimmy Anson? He’s
better on the psycho side than I am. I’ve a lot on my
hands just now. I’m much more worried about our
leucocyte counts than you are over your precious relics.”

“Why’s that?”

“Oh, no cause for immediate alarm. But they indi-
cate we’re adjusting to something, some foreign body
or bodies; I don’t suppose it’s one so much as a whole
host of different alien entities. It isn’t doing us any
real harm — but how would Earth react?”

Jacob sought out Anson, the linguistician. “You
have the advantage over us, old man; you can at least
take back all those analyses and recordings. All we’ve
got is photographs and film. I can’t think why they’re
so down on letting us have specimens. I shall be
darned unpopular with the powers at home. Never
happened to me before.”

The linguistician had been added to the expedition
almost as a late afterthought, together with a great deal
of equipment which had caused some bad language
among those who were working out loads and logistics.
Pitied by the interpreters at first, he was later regarded
with envious tolerance as he took, with their only too
necessary assistance, recording after recording, from
cubs and adults of both sexes and all ages, often using
thumbnail sketches to get his or their meaning across,
or to keep the victims amused. He had a battery of
results which seemed to keep him perfectly happy
working on day after day, only now and again breaking
surface to get the interpreters to arrange a new test
interview. The Shm’qh let him torment them with
palatograms, pharyngoscopes, torches and X-ray photo-

graphy, uncomplaining. Eventually he took to wander-
ing in the settlements with a pocket recorder, some-
times sketching the vegetation to distract attention.
“Are they adamant about it then?”

“A flat refusal every time I ask — quite cheerful, but
always no. I think we must have offended them more
deeply over Scatterthwaite’s gaffe than we realised.
You know two of them threw it back at Simons and
Harte the other day?”

“Really? I can’t believe it! What were they doing?”
“Doing no harm, simply carrying the genny up to
Blue Knoll the day the beano was on. Two Shmur” —
Jacobs usually called the race that to his crew — “did
the grin gesture at them and called out — you know
— Tchuffjim or whatever it is.”

“You mean ty-whdy-m, I suppose?”

“That’s it. Only they used the short-/ vowel. Could
there be anything in that? Does that take the sting
out of it, do you think?”

\ slow smile spread over Anson’s face, then became
a grin. “In a way, yes, but not the way you sup-
pose. I think I have the answer to that problem.”

“Do you indeed? Well let’s have it, for God’s sake,
man. We might be on the edge of a volcano — they
could be working up to attack us!”

“No, it’s all right, I think. There’s no malice and no
guile in this race, as far as I can see. But first about
that vowel. These vowels aren’t phonemes in the strict
sense — ”

“What’s a phoneme, for Heaven’s sake?”

“Take too long to explain properly. But roughly
speaking, it’s a class of sound, like say t or d or short-
0, recognised by a particular language, which makes
a brick you can build meaningful words out of. Now
these Sshm-qh vowels aren’t like that at all. They’re
more like the intonation in an English sentence. They
carry feeling-tones. If I say Sshm-qh by itself, with a
sort of murmur-vowel — we’d call it schwa — in the
middle, it means I am just mentioning the Sshm-qh
without any special feeling. (By the way, if you can’t use
a phonetic scAwn-symbol when you’re writing the langu-
age, why not write an ordinary e, instead of that am-
biguous apostrophe, or the hyphen?) Now, if I say
Sshmiqh or Sshmeeqh (or in this case, probably
Sshmiiqh) with an i-type vowel. I’m amused, or specially
cheerful. If I say Sshmooqh with that w-sound, it means
I love them, or I’m feeling sentimental or something. If
I say Sshmahqh with that a-sound, it means I’m angry,
or frightened, or that some sort of emergency is on. If I
say Sshauqh with that osound, it means I’m sad, or
depressed, or awed about something.”

“Would you use these vowels just for key words, or
a whole sentence?”

“A whole sentence or a whole speech. They’re supra-
segmental phonemes in the American sense, really, they
carry over the whole utterance. The Sshmeqh mouth

Page 41

returns to the /-position, or the a-position, or whatever
it is, whenever it gets the chance. In fact they’re an un-
conscious reaction, more or less.”

“Is that why their speech is so monotonous in tone?”
“Yes, you’ve got it. They’ve no function for pitch
variation.”

“So those two villains were amused at the idiocy
of the men carrying a heavy genny?”

“Not necessarily. No, I don’t think so. They were in
a cheerful mood, or joking, but I don’t think they were
jibing at Simons and — was it Harte you said?”
“Yes. They’ve kept clear of the blighters ever since.
Say they hate their guts.”

“Quite unnecessary. I wish they’d called me in. You
see, I don’t think you quite realise the sound-struc-
ture of this language. How many different consonant
sounds do you think there are?”

“Well, there’s b, d, f, g, a sort of g/r-sound, /, at least
two kinds of /-sound, m, n, and I suppose linguists call
ng another?, then there’s p, q, a g/z-sound, sh, t, v, at
least one kind of w, a separate wh- or /zw-sound, that
ubiquitous y-sound, and a kind of z/z-sound — or is that
the same as /? That makes, say, 21?”

Anson sighed, just perceptibly. “Of distinguishable
consonants there are at least 36; not that that’s high
for a language, that is considering there are no vowels
properly speaking. And these consonants are not as
haphazard as you seem to think.”

“You mean, we may have got a consonant wrong in
that T chuff jim word — it may mean something else?”
“Just that — and a little bit more. Come and look
at my charts.” Anson rolled down a cylinder on a
wall. Three columns of twelve symbols (six pairs) each,
were printed on it in his clear hand.

“I can’t follow these phoney — phonee — phonemes,
do you call them?”

“No, these are not phonemic symbols. They are my
shot at a structure of broad phonetic symbols in accord-
ance with Sshmeqh phonology; or rather according to
this Sshmeqh language : there are others further round
the planet. I’m told, quite different, and what’s more
many of them are full of true vowels too. In fact I’ve
been going to ask you if I could have a month away
at the nearest language frontier — it’s supposed to be
the equivalent of only 2,500 kilometres south-south-
east — and take a tape-machine. That one’s a tone-
language, moreover, like Chinese as it were. I could
test whether the Sshmeqh pictograms were interlingual
too. I’d use one of the short-hop craft. I’d like to
take one of the interpreters and a native friend of
mine who knows the way and could help with the
other language. We’d need some hot-climate clothing
and so on. I would have to leave all the possible analyses
till I got back. It should provide enough material to
give the elements of a second language for any future
expedition, eh?”

“What would you do about your stuff here? You’d
be out of effective radio range, too.”

“I’d leave it sealed and labelled, in case anything

happened to me, with all my notes. I could leave in-
structions what native to contact in case we never
turned up again and you thought it worth sending a
second machine with a search party.”

“I think maybe we could manage it, if you set out
within a week and come back within four weeks after
that. That gives us a week or two’s margin for search
in case. Sound the interpreters and see who would
best like to go with you . . . Well now, what do these
columns of symbols stand for?”

“Thanks, Chief. Well, the left-hand column here is
what with us would be labials — lip-sounds. Actually
they use the orifice-mantle and outer teeth. There are
two kinds of p-sound, two b’s, no f or v by itself at
all, two w-sounds, two Wz-like sounds above them there,
two m’s, and two labial laterals (rather a strange bird
linguistically).”

Jacobs snorted.

“Similarly with these palatals, or what with us would
be palatalised gingivals and such. They use the inner
rows of teeth and the tongue. There are two /y-like
sounds, two dy-Iike sounds, two s/z-like sounds, and
so on, all corresponding to the “labial” examples in
the first column. . . . Then on the right are the quasi-
velar, quasi-uvular sounds — two q’s, two qh’s and so
on. They use the retro-tongue for these, not the main
tongue at all. . . . All these 36 are not counting collo-
cational variants. What the retrolingual l does to a
neighbouring orifice-/, for instance, is nobody’s busi-
ness.”

Jacobs ground his teeth silently.

“Well, the word these two men thought was
tyewhdyem (but I spell it with only four consonant
symbols to your seven, and two schwas) was. I’m pretty
certain, tchewhdyemm — look. I’ll write it here, though
I’d spell it professionally with only five consonants at
most; and the first consonant, you see here, is a differ-
ent one.”

“And that means?”

“ ‘Tough’, ‘brave’, ‘stout-hearted’; or ‘courage’, ‘guts’,
if you like: that’s what they were calling them, tough
guys. The z'-vowel and the grin posture, in so far as
they were conscious at all, were complimentary, a slap
on the back, I expect.”

“My God! . . . How do the words come to be so
much alike?”

“They’re only alike to you because you aren’t used
to Sshmeqh phonology. Also, we don’t know for cer-
tain what really reaches their aural centres in their
brains. Listen to this — ■” and he switched on a machine.
It was saying over and over again, “Tch-mb-, tch-mb-,
tch-mb-. . . .”

“Now this.”

"Ty-mm-ny, ty-mm-ny, ty-mm-ny. . .

“Can’t hear much difference except at the end.”

“Wait. Listen to this. This is word number one.”

D epressing another switch, Anson produced from
the machine something like a deep yawning tone

Page 42

that sounded like “Ttthawmhwbbah . . . ttthawmhwbbah
*»

“That’s quarter-speed or so. Now the second word.”

This time the machine produced “Ttrrhhohmwwaw-
hnn . . . ttrrhhohmwwawhnrt. . .

“Yes, I begin to see. You think that’s what they
really hear?”

“Who’s to say? We can’t dissect them, and even if
we could! And as they have no true writing, only a
kind of pictography, there are no graphic clues. All
I’m saying is, there is a difference which quartering the
speed brings out, and maybe their auditory chain can
pick up this difference easier than ours can. Now I
have another surprise for you. These 36 consonants
aren’t true phonemes. There are only about 18
phonemes. A pretty meagre equipment by human
standards, particularly as there aren’t any true vowels,
but quite adequate to furnish a language. Anyway,
about half of the 36 consonants are the manifestations.
I’m pretty sure, of combinations of phonemes. You
know how some men’ll say ‘Canh say’ instead of ‘Can’t
say’. Well, that voiceless n at the end of ‘Canh’ may
be regarded as a combination, in their speech, of an
n-phoneme and a /-phoneme. Same here, only all over.
Look, here’s my battery of phonemes.”

Anson unrolled another chart in which the three
columns now contained six symbols each.

“I won’t bother you with details, but that sound
tch, for instance, in the word meaning ‘brave’, is a
compound of two /y-phonemes. I have a suspicion that
in that particular case the first ty comes from a word
ety meaning ‘very’, which you can hear quite a lot of.
And the long m-sound at the end is undoubtedly two
m' s, only I haven’t disentangled their meanings. One
of the two 6-sounds in the language is really a com-
bination of p and b, and so with all the other pairs
of voiced stops and fricatives,”

Jacobs groaned softly. “I’d give a lot to be dealing
with Earth!”

“Oh, I could show you far worse things in a lot of
human languages. This lot is child’s play. Now, I have
another little surprise. You say you’re always meeting
a No, especially when you ask if you can take some
specimens home — right?”

“I only I could crack that! it’s wrecking all my
programme ! ”

Anson regarded his chief with a calm but guarded
gaze, like an experienced mother considering a frac-
tious child.

“You think there’s one word shnyewh, don’t you?
and so. I’m afraid do the interpreters; they’re very help-
ful, but they can’t know everything. But there isn’t
one word : there are two. Neither of them starts with
the same sound as the word Sshmeqh, by the way —
that’s another compound, a double s/i-sound. Both of
them begin with a simple sh. Listen to this.”

After some fiddling, Anson got his machine in-
toning “ Shny-wh , shny-wh, shny-wh. . . .”

“That’s the word I got whenever I pitched my in-
formants a question I knew had a negative answer.
Now listen to this; this was a response I got when
I asked certain carefully chosen questions.”

Again a repeated “Shny-wh, shny-wh, shny-wh. . . .”
“There is a difference somewhere.”

“Well, try the slow speed. Here’s number one.”

Jacobs heard “Thkhhnnauhhwh . . . thkhhnnauhhwh
»*

“Now number two.” “Thkhhnnohfhgh . . . thkhhnno-
hfhgh. . . .”

“The vowel sounds different!”

“Only because of the influence of the final consonant.
In the first word it was that one, the second symbol
of the second pair on my first chart; in the second
word it was the first of the second pair. If you can’t
stomach my symbols, you could write the end of the
second word with ph instead of wh. It’s tenser, tighter,
if you like. But let’s try the sound-spectrograph.”
Anson switched on a small illuminated screen, on
which he presently conjured up two versions of a figure
resembling an out-of-focus black-and-white photo-
graph, marred by movement, of the ruins of a rope-
bridge in a dense jungle gorge, during a thick fog.

“Now here’s your No-word, shnyewh. Left to right
is time. Upwards for higher pitch. Compare the other
word, alongside, shnyeph. This time we get this odd
transient up there near the end (which you never get
in our own attempts — may be something to do with
the tensing of the mantle round the outer teeth) and
the second pseudo-formant” (pointing to a sagging
strand of the rope-bridge) “drops quite a bit, compared
to its level in your first word, here. . . . Now here
instead are my synthetic versions. They are the mini-
mal freehand drawings that I could get a 95 per cent
“correct” response to when I played them back as
sound to natives. They are, if you like, the skeleton,
the basic structure; all the rest are adventitious trim-
mings.”

Anson lit up a chastely futuristic piece of abstract
art in which the rope-bridge and jungle had been re-
placed by smooth blips and snakes, and the fog had
gone. Then he “played” it back. It was recognisable, if
rather clipped and twangy, as the two original sneezes.
The second came to a perceptibly harder end.

“Now, this p/i-sound turns out to be a compound
of two w/i-phonemes. I happen to have succeeded in
dissecting these two words, so to speak. The first, which
means, roughly, ‘No’, is a kind of agglutination of esh,
which means ‘indeed’, ‘in fact’, or something like that;
nye, which means ‘not’, or ‘negative’; and ewh, which
means ‘thus’, or ‘so’, or ‘in that way’. So their ‘No’
means, etymologically, ‘Indeed not so’.”

“ ‘Indeed not so!’ What about the second word, for
Heaven’s sake!”

A gain that considering gaze.

“Well, the second word is esh plus nye plus ewh

Continued on Page 49

Page 43

Expressing the Abstract

A review of the work of M. C. Escher by Charles Platt

S peculative fiction has in the last five years become
a form involving greater abstraction of idea and
vision. Consequently, art concerned principally with the
visual interpretation of such subtleties is particularly
relevant to the form. M. C. Escher, the Dutch graphic
artist whose work illustrates this issue’s front cover,
is an excellent example of a man wholly concerned
with the expression of abstract — often even mathe-
matical — ideas.

Escher was born in 1898; since the 1930s he has
devoted his talents to mastering completely the process
of clearly expressing ideas which are wholly abstract.
His pictures use mathematics, geometry and visual
paradox for subject matter; and yet somehow they
escape the detachment and sterility of these fields.

The mathematical content of his art is one of its
most obvious aspects; in some cases pictures are de-
voted to illustrating a single idea. Figure 1, for example
(“Moebius Strip 1”) illustrates graphically the proper-
ties of this surface. That the strip only has one side
becomes obvious from the fact that the ants are
crawling nose-to-tail in one unbroken chain.

The Moebius strip theme is used in several other
prints, each with a fresh, distinctive interpretation of
the one-sided property.

Figures 2 and 3 are examples of tessellation, an art-
form of which Escher writes: “This is the richest
source of inspiration that I have struck, nor has it yet
dried up.”

Tessellation is the systematic division of an area into
identical pieces whose outlines interlock perfectly
when repeated, reversed or inverted. In simple designs,
this art has been used for architectural decoration;
examples in the Alhambra show that the Spanish
Moors were highly skilled in it, though all their patterns
were abstract, the representation of living creatures
being prohibited by Mohammedanism. By contrast,
Escher is concerned solely with evolving shapes of
birds, fish, reptiles and other animals to fit in his
tessellations.

The perfection of a tessellated pattern is in some
ways similar to solving a complex algebraic equation.
It is a self-imposed, obsessive task, carried out within
set rules, undertaken solely for its own sake.

Having perfected a tessellation, Escher incorporates

Page 44

figure 1

figure 3

it in a finished picture. Figure 4, “Reptiles”, illustrates
his close involvement with his work, an involvement
that is almost inevitable stemming from such single-
minded dedication to a laborious task. Escher writes :
“While drawing I sometimes feel as if I were a
spiritualist medium controlled by the creatures I am
conjuring up. It is as if they themselves decide on the
shape in which they choose to appear. . . .”

In this lithograph, almost as if by wish fulfilment,
one of his creatures comes to life. “Evidently one of
them has tired of lying flat and rigid amongst his
fellows, so he puts one plastic-looking leg over the edge
of the (drawing) book, wrenches himself free and
launches out into real life. He climbs up the back
of a book on zoology and works his laborious way up
the slippery slope of a set square to the highest point
of his existence. Then, after a quick snort, tired but
fulfilled, he . . . meekly rejoins his erstwhile friends,
taking up once more his function as an element of
surface division.”

This description is very reminiscent of the serious
man at play, pursuing a private whim or fantasy.
Escher’s emotional sympathy towards the creatures he
has laboriously created is also remarkable; his involve-
ment is like that of a numerologist so involved with
figures that individual numbers seem to take their
own distinctive personalities.

Figure 5, “Liberation”, is another example of
tessellated creatures freeing themselves from their
paper domain. But it illustrates, in addition, Escher’s
feelings for visual paradox. Which are “real” — the
birds on the paper strip, or the birds flying? Where,
and how, does the transition occur? What happens to
the roll of paper which the birds were drawn on?

This kind of paradox is developed much further.
In another series of drawings (not involving tessella-
tions), Escher questions the artist’s assumption that
it is logical to assume a piece of paper is flat, and to
decorate it with lines, giving an illusion of depth. By
violating these traditions, an unsettling real /unreal
effect is created.

For instance, “Dragon”, in figure 6. Escher writes:
“However much this dragon tries to be spatial, he
remains completely flat. Two incisions are made in
the paper on which he is printed. Then it is folded in
such a way as to leave two square openings. But this
dragon is an obstinate beast, and in spite of his two
dimensions he persists in assuming that he has three;
so he sticks his head through one of the holes and his
tail through the other.”

Thus the picture is of a picture, which has been cut
and folded in the manner described. But are the head
and tail of the dragon any more “real” than the “two
dimensional” remainder, folded to occupy three dimen-
sions? It is a subtle, graphic demonstration that all
two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional
objects are fundamentally unreal.

Again, Escher writes almost affectionately about the
dragon he has drawn. He treats it with casual famili-

Page 45

figure 4

arity, as if it were an every-day specimen from some
standard textbook. Either he has grown used to the
power of his imagery, or he is too close to it to see
how bizarre this dragon is, as it stands frozen like a
myth creature dredged from deep recesses of a haunted
mind.

His matter-of-fact attitude towards the imagery he
uses to dramatise his ideas is also shown towards
“Three Worlds”, a lithograph reproduced in Figure 7.
The subject is three intersecting realities: a lake, de-
fined by the floating leaves; three trees, reflected; and
a giant, brooding fish, staring malevolently up through
the barrier of the water’s surface, unsettlingly like a
blurred nightmare image swimming trapped below the

level of consciousness. Escher, in a brief, factual des-
cription of this picture, mentions it only in passing.

His most recent lithographs explore visual paradox
and perspective tricks, one of which (a picture of men
descending an unending staircase) achieved superficial
recognition as an “optical illusion” in a colour supple-
ment Christmas feature.

But Escher’s ideas go far deeper than this. “High
and Low”, in Figure 8, uses the fact that perspective
applies as much to vertical parallel lines as to horizon-
tals; both appear to curve away from the onlooker,
converging as they do so. A camera will illustrate this
effect, whereas artists have traditionally compensated
for it. It is used by Escher for a visual trick enabling

Page 46

figure 6

him to show two different views of the same building
in one picture. The top half of Figure 8 shows the
scene observed from several storeys up; the bottom
half depicts the same scene from ground level. The
tiled area in the picture’s centre serves as either floor
or ceiling; the perspective vanishing point is situated
variously on the horizon, at the zenith and at the nadir,
depending on whether one observes the bottom, middle
or top of the picture.

The lithograph illustrating our front cover this issue
is titled “Relativity”; it depicts, in effect, the cohabita-
tion of people from three different universes, each
experiencing gravity at a direction at right angles to
the other two. Escher writes; “It is impossible for
the inhabitants of (the three) different worlds to walk,
sit or stand on the same floor, because they have differ-
ing conceptions of what is horizontal and what is ver-
tical. Yet they may well share the use of the same
staircase. On the top staircase illustrated here, two
people are moving side by side and in the same direc-
tion, and yet one of them is going downstairs and the
other upstairs. Contact between them is out of the
question, because they live in different worlds and
therefore can have no knowledge of each other’s exis-
tence.”

Within the reality system of the picture, this makes

Ips^ > .

1 /

figure 5

Page 47

figure 7

a strange kind of logic. Without the picture, it would
mean nothing. Thus Escher has conveyed visually an
idea inexpressible in words alone.

Moreover, the picture is no mere mathematical
model. It has an atmosphere of its own. One becomes
fascinated by the figures walking mindlessly through
unending labyrinths of visual paradox, enacting ritual
tasks, blind to the glaring impossibilities of their en-
vironment. They climb and descend staircases, pause
for refreshment and continue like clockwork marion-
ettes in a strange, other-universe architectural model
of unfeasibility.

Other pictures by Escher share this feeling for
imagery — a feeling he largely ignores when writing
about his work. Lizards crawl hungrily from the tessel-
lated centre of a blurred chessboard; a giant praying
locust crouches parasitically on the chest of a sleeping
bishop; winged feline creatures emerge from the plane
surface of a mirror and circle round in rigid formation
to meet their mirror images, intermingling and sinking
into the table top to form a frozen tessellation; great
reptiles, teeth bared, stare malevolently out from the
barred confines of a geometrical figure suspended in

Page 48

timeless black space; flatworms swim placidly through
water-filled chambers built from tetrahedron-shaped
bricks.

Escher distils the essence of an abstract vision; he
populates a half-real, meticulously detailed scene with
creatures illustrating its properties; and he presents the
finished picture as a homogeneous whole, lacking
neither subtlety nor power in its graphically simple
representation of the original idea.

He is strongly aware of this process. “After a long
series of attempts ... I manage to cast my lovely
dream in the defective visual mould of a detailed con-
ceptual sketch. ... Yet a mental image is something
completely different from a visual image, and however

hard one exerts oneself, one can never manage to
capture the fullness of that perfection.”

An author may encounter the same problems, search-
ing for scenery on completely new means of expres-
sion to convey the complex qualities of a mental image.
It is this similarity of aim which links the mood of
Escher’s drawings with that of the most imaginative
speculative fiction.

The assistance of Mr. Escher’s Dutch publishers, Messrs.
Koninklijke Uitgeverij J. J. Tijl N.V. Zwolle, is gratefully
acknowledged. The reproductions in this article were taken
from their book M.C. Escher, Grafik en Tekerungen, which
will shortly be published in English by The Oldbourne Press,
to whom we are also indebted for their help in preparing this
article. Reference was made to Martin Gardner’s article on
M. C. Escher in scientific American.

Not so certain continued from page 43

all over again, plus another wh which comes. I’m vir-
tually certain (but it’d take months to prove) from
whe."

“And what the hell does whuh mean?” snarled
Jacobs.

‘Whe means ‘definitely’, ‘certainly’, or ‘definite’,
‘certain’, ‘known’, or ‘certainty’. They use it to indicate
the exact spot on a plant or a picture, the known
place of an event, an agreed shade of colour — their
colours, that is, not the ones we distinguish.”

“And what the — for God’s sake cut the cackle and
tell me what all that means!”

“In literal order, it means: ‘Indeed not so certain’;
or, as we might say, ‘Indeed not definitely or certainly
so’.”

“ ‘Indeed not so certain’ — what does that mean?”

“It‘s their equivalent of our word ‘Perhaps’.”

“ ‘Perhaps’: then all they’ve done is refuse to make
their minds up about the specimens. And my God,
that ravine that wasn’t supposed to be crossable — they
only meant perhaps it was crossable?”

“Very likely.”

“And poor old Jackson: they only meant perhaps
he’d survive?”

“Yes, I should imagine so. I ought to have cottoned
on to that myself — I heard about it.”

“My God, you should. Maybe I ought to have
thought sooner about asking you, but you could have
thought about our practical problems, too, Jimmy. . . .
By the way, surely when two words are so alike one
of them is going to drop out sooner or later. I mean,
it could be risky even to a Shmur?”

“Remember we don’t know how their aural set-up
works. Or even their syntactical consciousness. Their
grammar must bring about some queer verbal thinking.
You know, so far I can only distinguish two classes
of word, Dependants and Independants, and two func-
tions. Absolute and Modifier; the Independants can act
as Absolutes, but need not do so. . . . But still, there
is something in what you say. It could solve itself by

an extra consonant creeping into the perhaps word
through the shoving on of yet another Modifier. But as
a matter of fact it wouldn’t surprise me if the perhaps
word were to die out presently in favour of some
other less ambiguous expression. Language never stays
still. They have produced such an expression in my
hearing which may gain ground, although at the
moment it has a rather contemptuous overtone. It’s
‘bheng elyeny’, or phonemically” (he wrote on the pad)
“you might write it 'wweng elyeny’, which of course
means ‘chance equal’.”

“So they can’t make up their minds whether to let
us have specimens or not. How am I going to per-
suade them to say Yes? It’s vital to our programme
to get at least some artefacts back, and the geneticists
and so on will want to take the cell-structure of crop
specimens apart.”

“No, I think there’s something else here. Don’t tell
me, let me guess. ... I don’t think the interpreters
would have slipped up on this one, but you were going
it alone, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Well . . . what those fellows may have thought you
were asking was, I suggest, whether you could, physi-
cally, succeed in getting their specimens safely from
here to Earth. The syntax is a bit tricky, but you
should have requested permission — ‘qhedyep geph’, if
you like — instead of enquiring about possibility —
'ezhnye bvew’. So, if I’m right, they thought you thought
they might know how tough these specimens’d be. And
naturally they said ‘perhaps’. Am I right?”

“My God, I believe you are! All they meant was,
they didn’t know whether the things would survive
the journey ! I’ll start begging specimens off them right
away. . . . Well, Jimmy, I’ll give you a dinner at
Savoni’s for that, when we get back to Earth; after
we get out of quarantine, that is.”

“Do you think” (Anson dropped his voice) “they’ll
ever let us out of quarantine. Chief?”

“ ‘Indeed . . . not ... so certain.’ ”

Page 49

The Soft World Sequence By George MacBeth

the sea

Through the glass floor,
from below,
he could see the girl
in the glass typing-chair,

in the glass skirt,

crossing her flesh legs

over the glass eye

in her groin. Glassily, it stared

at his own eye, and slowly,
the world of glass,
opening, closing,
became soft,

like the lips of an octopus
with eight legs
opening, closing,
in the Indian Ocean.

the clouds

The man had been a bit
slow on the uptake, but
when his elbows went through
the light oak,

he saw the point. After his leg, too,

had sunk in

and was shivering

in the middle of the carbon-paper drawer, they began

to realise just how far
it had gone. Not even
the one in the telephone
bothered about the screaming then,

though it did make a hell
of a noise. It was how
to profit from it that occupied
all their minds. After so long

without anyone wondering
how they felt about it all,
none of them was accustomed
to making much of an impact. So

the man did wade in diminishing
circles, evidently
grasping (albeit rather slowly)
just how soft the whole

thing had become. It took him
several minutes, though,
to appreciate the full reason
for the watery coolness.

When he did,

there was more noise. The one in the PAX phone
got quite a headache
in its ear-piece.

Elsewhere I doubt

if they had so much trouble. Just

a fluffy moistness

easing in where

the old edges had been. And then
the slow, steady,
drumming, pita-pata
sound, as the rain started.

the earth

Well, it was all, really,
a palpable jelly,
touchable, glaucous,
very good to eat

in its own way, if you liked
that sort of thing. I mean before
the day of the cucumbers.

After that, the hard edges

all became round heads,
and there wasn’t much
you could do about it.

Not without risking

a hell of a row,

and maybe getting cut,

or swallowed up

in the ice. Let well alone.

even the one in the floor
let him run his legs through
for a while without
worrying. Of course.

I always say.

Take what comes.

You can’t win them all. Not
without being one of them yourself.

Page 50

In The

House
Of The
Dead

By Roger Zelazny

e man walks through his Thousandyear Eve in
the House of the Dead. If you could look about
the enormous rooms through which he walks, you
couldn’t see a thing. It is far too dark for eyes to be of
value.

For this dark time, we’ll simply refer to him as “the
man”.

There are two reasons for doing so:

First, he fits the general and generally accepted de-
scription of an unmodified, male, human model being
— walking upright, having opposing thumbs and pos-
sessing the other typical characteristics of the profession
— and second, because his name has been taken from
him.

There is no reason to be more specific at this point.

In his right hand, the man bears the staff of his
Master, and it guides him through the dark. It tugs him
this way, that way. It bums his hand, his fingers, his
opposing thumb if his foot strays a step from its or-
dained path.

When the man reaches a certain place within the
darkness, he mounts seven steps to a stone dais and
raps three times upon it with the staff.

Then there is light, dim and orange and crowded
into corners. It shows the edges of the enormous, un-
filled room.

He reverses the staff and screws it into a socket in
the stone.

Had you ears in that room, you would hear a sound
as of winged insects circling near you, withdrawing,
returning.

Only the man hears it, though. There are over two

Page 51

thousand other people present, but they are all of them
dead.

They come up out of the transparent rectangles which
now appear in the floor, come up unbreathing, un-
blinking and horizontal, and they rest upon invisible
catafalques at a height of two feet, and their garments
and their skins are of all colours and their bodies of all
ages. Now some have wings and some have tails, and
some have horns and some long talons. Some have all
of these things, and some have pieces of machinery
built into them and some do not. Many others look like
the man, unmodified.

The man wears yellow breeches and a sleeveless shirt
of the same colour. His belt and cloak are black. He
stands beside his Master’s gleaming staff and he regards
the dead beneath him.

“Get up!” he calls out. “All of you!”

And his words mix with the humming that is in the
air and are repeated over and over and again, not like
an echo, fading, but persistent and recurring, with the
force of an electric alarm.

The air is filled and stirred. There comes a moaning
and a creaking of brittle joints, then movement.

Rustling, clicking, chafing, they sit up, they stand up.

Then sound and movement cease, and the dead stand
like unlit candles beside their opened graves.

The man climbs down from the dais, stands a mo-
ment before it, then says, “Follow me!” and he walks
back the way he came, leaving his Master’s staff
vibrating in the grey air.

As he walks, he comes to a woman who is tall and
golden and a suicide: He stares into her unseeing eyes
and says, “Do you know me?” and the orange lips, the
dead lips, the dry lips move, and they whisper, “No”,
but he stares longer and says, “Did you know me?” and
the air hums with his words, until she says, “No”, once
again, and he passes her by.

He questions two others: a man who had been ancient
of days, with a clock built into his left wrist, and a
black dwarf with horns and hooves and the tail of a
goat. But both say, “No”, and they fall into step behind
him, and they follow him out of that enormous room
and into another, where more lie under stone, not really
waiting, to be called forth for his Thousandyear Eve in
the House of the Dead.

tThtE man leads them. He leads the dead whom he has
A summoned back to movement, and they follow
him. They follow him through corridors and galleries
and halls, and up wide, straight stairways and down
narrow, winding stairways, and they come at last into
the great Hall of the House of the Dead, where his
Master holds his court.

He sits on a black throne of polished stone, and there
are metal bowls of fire to his right and to his left. On
each of the two hundred pillars that line his high Hall,
a torch blazes and flickers and its spark-shot smoke
coils and puffs upward, becoming at last a grey part of

the flowing cloud that covers the ceiling completely.

He does not move, but he regards the man as he
advances across the Hall, five thousand of the dead at
his back, and his eyes lie red upon him as he comes
forward.

The man prostrates himself at his feet, and he does
not move until he is addressed:

“You may greet me and rise,” come the words, each
of them a sharp, throaty stab in the midst of an audible
exhalation.

“Hail, Anubis! Master of the House of the Dead!”
says the man, and he stands.

Anubis lowers his black muzzle slightly and his fangs
are white within it. Red lightning, his tongue, forks for-
ward, re-enters his mouth. He stands then, and the
shadows slide downward upon his bare and manformed
body.

He raises his left hand and the humming sound comes
into the Hall, and it carries his words through the
flickering light and the smoke:

“You who are dead,” he says, “tonight you will dis-
port yourselves for my pleasure. Food and wine will
pass between your dead lips, though you will not taste
it. Your dead stomachs will hold it within you, while
your dead feet take the measure of a dance. Your dead
mouths will speak words that will have no meaning to
you, and you will embrace one another without plea-
sure. You will sing for me if I wish it. You will lie down
again when I will it.”

He raises his right hand.

“Let the revelry begin,” he says, and he claps his
hands together.

Then tables slide forward from between the pillars,
laden with food and with drink, and there is music upon
the air.

The dead move to obey him.

“You may join them,” Anubis says to the man, and
he reseats himself upon his throne.

The man crosses to the nearest table and eats lightly
and drinks a glass of wine. The dead dance about him,
but he does not dance with them. They makes noises
which are words without meaning, and he does not
listen to them. He pours a second glass of wine and the
eyes of Anubis are upon him as he drinks it. He pours
a third glass and he holds it in his hands and sips at
it and stares into it.

How much time has passed he cannot tell, when
Anubis says, “Servant!”

He stands, turns.

“Approach!” says Anubis, and he does so.

“You may rise. You know what night tonight is?”
“Yes, Master. It is Thousandyear Eve.”

“It is your Thousandyear Eve. This night we cele-
brate an anniversary. You have served me for a full
thousand years in the House of the Dead. Are you
glad?”

“Yes, Master.”

“You recall my promise?”

Page 52

“Yes. You told me that if I served you faithfully for
a thousand years, then you would give me back my
name. You would tell me who I had been in the Middle
Worlds of Life.”

“I beg your pardon, but I did not.”

“You . . .?”

“I told you that I would give you a name, which is a
different thing altogether.”

“But I thought . .

“I do not care what you thought. Do you want a
name?”

“Yes, Master . . .”

. . But you would prefer your old one? Is that what
you are trying to say?”

“Yes.”

“Do you really think that anyone would remember
your name after ten centuries? Do you think that you
were so important in the Middle Worlds that someone
would have noted down your name, that it would have
mattered to anyone?”

“I do not know.”

“But you want it back?”

“If I may have it. Master.”

“Why? Why do you want it?”

“Because I remember nothing of the Worlds of Life.
I would like to know who I was when I dwelled there.”
“Why? For what purpose?”

“I cannot answer you because I do not know.”

“Of all the dead,” says Anubis, “you know that I have
brought only you back to full consciousness to serve me
here. Do you feel this means that perhaps there is some-
thing special about you?”

“I have often wondered why you did as you did.”
“Then let me give you ease, man: You are nothing.
You were nothing. You are not remembered. Your
mortal name does not signify anything.”

The man lowers his eyes.

“Do you doubt me?”

“No, Master . .

“Why not?”

“Because you do not lie.”

“Then let me show it. I took away your memories of
life only because they would give you pain among
the dead. But now let me demonstrate your anonymity.
There are over five thousand of the dead in this room,
from many ages and places.”

Anubis stands, and his voice carries to every presence
in the Hall:

“Attend me, maggots! Turn your eyes toward this
man who stands before my throne! — Face them, man!”
The man turns about.

“Man, know that today you do not wear the body you
slept in last night. You look now as you did a thousand
years ago, when you came into the House of the Dead.

“My dead ones, are there any of you here present
who can look upon this man and say that you know
him?”

a golden girl steps forward.

“I know this man,” she says, through orange lips,
“because he spoke to me in the other hall.”

“That I know,” says Anubis, “but who is he?”

“He is the one who spoke to me.”

“That is no answer. Go and copulate with yon purple
lizard. —And what of you, old man?”

“He spoke to me also.”

“That I know. Can you name him?”

“I cannot.”

“Then go dance on yonder table and pour wine over
your head. — What of you, black man?”

“This man also spoke with me.”

“Do you know his name?”

“I did not know it when he asked me — ”

“Then burn!” cries Anubis, and fires fall down from
the ceiling and leap out from the walls and crisp the
black man to ashes, which move then in slow eddies
across the floor, passing among the ankles of the stopped
dancers, falling finally into final dust.

“You see?” says Anubis. “There is none to name you
as once you were known.”

“I see,” says the man, “but the last might have had
further words — ”

“To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save
by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various
embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever
epitaph.”

“Thank you. Master.”

“What good would a name and memories do you
here?”

“None, I suppose.”

“Yet you wish a name, so I shall give you one. Draw
your dagger.”

The man draws the blade which hangs at his left side.
“Now cut off your thumb.”

“Which thumb. Master?”

“The left one will do.”

The man bites his lower lip and tightens his eyes as
he drags the blade against the joint of his thumb. His
blood falls upon the floor. It runs along the blade of
the knife and trickles from its point. He drops to his
knees and continues to cut, tears streaming down his
cheeks and falling to mingle with the blood. His breath
comes in gasps and a single sob escapes him.

Then, “It is done,” he says. “Here!” He drops the
blade and offers Anubis his thumb.

“I don’t want the thing! Throw it into the flames!”
With his right hand, the man throws his thumb into
the brazier. It splutters, sizzles, flares.

“Now cup your left hand and collect the blood within
it.”

The man does this thing.

“Now raise it above your head and let it drip down
upon you.”

He raises his hand and the blood falls on to his fore-
head.

Page 53

“Now repeat after me: ‘I baptize me . .

“ ‘I baptize me . .

“ ‘Wakim, of the House of the Dead . .

“ ‘Wakim, of the House of the Dead . .

“ ‘In the name of Anubis . .

“ ‘In the name of Anubis : .

“ ‘Wakim . .

“ ‘Wakim . .

“ ‘Emissary of Anubis in the Middle Worlds . .

“ ‘Emissary of Anubis in the Middle Worlds . .

“ . and beyond.’ ”

“ . and beyond.’ ”

“Hear me now, oh you dead ones: I proclaim this
man Wakim. Repeat his name!”

"Wakim,” comes the word, through dead lips.

“So be it! You are named now, Wakim,” he says. “It
is fitting, therefore, that you feel your birth into name-
hood, that you come away changed by this thing, oh my
named one!”

Anubis raises both hands above his head and lowers
them to his sides.

“Resume dancing!” he commands the dead.

They move to the music once more.

The body-cutting machine rolls into the hall, and the
prosthetic replacement machine follows it.

Wakim looks away from them, but they draw up
beside him and stop.

The first machine extrudes restrainers and holds him.
“Human arms are weak,” says Anubis. “Let these be
removed.”

The man screams as the sawblades hum. Then he
passes out. The dead continue their dance.

when wakim awakens, two seamless, silver arms hang
at his sides, cold and insensitive. He flexes the fingers.

“And human legs be slow, and capable of fatigue. Let
those he wears be exchanged for tireless metal.”

When Wakim awakens the second time, he stands
upon silver pillars. He wiggles his toes. Anubis’ tongue
darts forth.

“Place your right hand into the flames,” he says, “and
hold it there until it glows white.”

The music falls around him, and the flames caress his
hand until it matches their red. The dead talk their dead
talk and drink the wine they do not taste. They embrace
one another without pleasure. The hand glows white.

“Now,” says Anubis, “seize your manhood in your
right hand and burn it away.”

Wakim licks his lips.

“Master . . .” he says.

“Do it!”

He does this thing, and he falls to unconsciousness
before he has finished.

When he awakens again and looks down upon him-
self, he is all of gleaming silver, sexless and strong.
When he touches his forehead, there comes the sound
of metal upon metal.

“How do you feel, Wakim?” asks Anubis.

“I do not know,” he answers, and his voice comes
strange and harsh.

Anubis gestures, and the nearest side of the cutting
machine becomes a reflecting surface.

“Regard yourself.”

Wakim stares at the shining egg that is his head, at
the yellow lenses, his eyes, the gleaming barrel, his
chest.

“Men may begin and end in many ways,” says
Anubis. “Some may start as machines and gain their
humanity slowly. Others may end as such, losing it by
pieces as they live. That which is lost may always be
regained. That which is gained may always be lost.
— What are you, Wakim, a man or a machine?”

“I do not know.”

“Then let me confuse you further.”

Anubis gestures, and Wakim’s arms and legs come
loose, fall away. His metal torso clangs against stone,
rolls, then lies at the foot of the throne.

“Now you lack mobility,” says Anubis.

He reaches forward with his foot and touches a
tiny switch at the back of Wakim’s head.

“Now you lack all senses but hearing.”

“Yes,” answers Wakim.

“Now a connection is being attached to you. You feel
nothing, but your head is opened and you are about to
become a part of the machine which monitors and
maintains this entire world. See it all now!”

“I do,” he replies, as he becomes conscious of every
room, corridor, hall and chamber in the always dead
never alive world that has never been a world, a world
made, not begotten of coalesced starstuff and the fires
of creation, but hammered and jointed, riveted and
fused, insulated and decorated, not into seas and land
and air and life, but oils and metals and stone and
walls of energy, all hung together within the icy void
where no sun shines; and he is aware of distances,
stresses, weights, materials, pressures and the secret
numbers of the dead. He is not aware of his body,
mechanical and disconnected. He knows only the waves
of maintenance movement that flow through the House
of the Dead. He flows with them and he knows the
colourless colours of quantity perception.

Then Anubis speaks again:

“You know every shadow in the House of the Dead.
You have looked through all the hidden eyes.”

“Yes.”

“Now see what lies beyond.”

There are stars, stars, scattered stars, blackness all
between. They ripple and fold and bend, and they rush
toward him, rush by him. Their colours are blazing and
pure as angels’ eyes, and they pass near, pass far, in
the eternity through which he seems to move. There
is no sense of real time or real movement, only a chang-
ing of the field. A great blue Tophet Box of a sun
seems to soar beside him for a moment, and then again
comes black, all about him, and more small lights that
pass, distantly.

Page 54

And he comes at last to a world that is not a world,
citrine and azure and green, green, green. A green
corona hangs about it, at thrice its own diameter, and
it seems to pulsate with a pleasant rhythm.

“Behold the House of Life,” says Anubis, from
somewhere.

And he does. It is warm and glowing and alive. He
has a feeling of aliveness.

“Osiris rules the House of Life,” says Anubis.

And he beholds a great bird-head atop human
shoulders, bright yellow eyes within it, alive, alive-o;
and the creature stands before him on an endless plain
of living green which is superimposed upon his view
of the world, and he holds the Staff of Life in his one
hand and the Book of Life in his other. He seems to be
the source of the radiant warmth.

Wakim then hears the voice of Anubis once again:
“The House of Life and the House of the Dead
contain the Middle Worlds.”

and there is a falling, swirling sensation, and Wakim
looks upon stars once more, but stars separated and
held from other stars by bonds of force that are visible
then invisible, then visible again, fading, coming, going,
white, glowing lines, fluctuating.

“You now perceive the Middle Worlds of Life,” says
Anubis.

And dozens of worlds roll before him like balls of
exotic marble, stippled, polished, incandescent.

“. . . Contained,” says Anubis. “They are contained
within the field which arcs between the only two poles
that matter.”

“Poles?” says the metal head that is Wakim.

“The House of Life and the House of the Dead. The
Middle Worlds about their suns do move, and all to-
gether go on the paths of Life and Death.”

“I do not understand,” says Wakim.

“Of course you do not understand. What is at the
same time the greatest blessing and the greatest curse in
the universe?”

“I do not know.”

“Life,” says Anubis, “or death.”

“I do not understand,” says Wakim. “You used the
superlative. You called for one answer. You named two
things, however.”

“Did I?” asks Anubis. “Really? Just because I used
two words, does it mean that I have named two separate
and distinct things. May a thing not have more than one
name?” Take yourself for an example. What are you?”
“I do not know.”

“That may be the beginning of wisdom, then. You
could as easily be a machine which I chose to incarnate
as a man for a time and have now returned to a metal
casing, as you could be a man whom I have chosen to
incarnate as a machine.”

“Then what difference does it make?”

“None. None whatsoever. But you cannot make the
distinction. You cannot remember. Tell me, are you

alive?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I think. I hear your voice. I have memories. I can
speak.”

“Which of these qualities is life? Remember that you
do not breathe, your nervous system is a mass of metal-
lic strands and I have burnt your heart. Remember, too,
that I have machines that can outreason you, out-
remember you, out-talk you. What does that leave you
with as an excuse for being alive? You say that you
hear my voice, and ‘hearing’ is a subjective phenome-
non? Very well. I shall disconnect your hearing also.
Watch closely to see whether you cease to exist.”

. . . One snowflake drifting down a well, a well with-
out waters, without walls, without bottom, without top.
Now take away the snowflake and consider the drift-
ing. . . .

After a timeless time, Anubis’ voice comes once
again:

“Do you know the difference between life and death?”
“ T am life,” says Wakim. “Whatever you give or
take away, if ‘I’ remain it is life.”

“Sleep,” says Anubis, and there is nothing to hear
him, there in the House of the Dead.

hen wakim awakens, he finds that he has been set
upon a table near to the throne, and he can see
once more, and he regards the dance of the dead and he
hears the music to which they move.

“Were you dead?” asks Anubis.

“No,” says Wakim. “I was sleeping.”

“What is the difference?”

“ ‘I’ was still there, although I did not know it.”
Anubis laughs.

“Supposing I had never awakened you?”

“That, I suppose, would be death.”

“Death? If I did not choose to exercise my power to
awaken you? Even though the power was ever present,
and ‘you’ potential and available for that same ever?”
“If this thing were not done, if I remained forever
only potential, then this would be death.”

“A moment ago you said that sleep and death were
two different things. Is it that the period of time in-
volved makes a difference?”

“No,” says Wakim, “it is a matter of existence. After
sleep there comes wakefulness, and the life is still pre-
sent. When I exist, I know it. When I do not, I know
nothing.”

“Life then, is nothing?”

“No.”

“Life then, is existing? Like these dead?”

“No,” says Wakim. “It is knowing you exist, at least
some of the time.”

“Of what is this a process?”

“ ‘I’,” says Wakim.

“And what is T? Who are you?”

“I am Wakim.”

Page 55

“I only named you a short while ago! What were you
before that?”

“Not Wakim.”

“Dead?”

“No! Alive!” cries Wakim.

“Do not raise your voice within my halls,” says Anu-
bis. “You do not know what you are or who you are,
you do not know the difference between existing and
not existing, yet you presume to argue with me concern-
ing life and death! Now I shall not ask you, I shall tell
you. I shall tell you of life and of death.

“There is too much life and there is not enough
life,” he begins, “and the same goes for death. Now I
shall throw away paradoxes.

“The House of Life lies so far from here that a ray
of light which left it on the day you entered this domain
would not yet have travelled a significant fraction of the
distance which separates us. Between us lies the Middle
Worlds. They move within the Life-Death tides that
flow between my House and the House of Osiris. When
I say ‘flow’ I do not mean that they move like that piti-
ful ray of light, crawling. Rather, they move like waves
on the ocean which has but two shores. We may raise
waves anywhere we wish without disrupting the entire
sea. What are these waves, and what do they do?

“Some worlds have too much life,” he says. “Life —
crawling, populating, fecunding, smothering itself — -
worlds too clement, too full of the sciences which keep
men alive — worlds which would drown themselves in
their own semen, worlds which would pack all of their
lands with crowds of big-bellied women — and so go
down to death beneath the weight of their own fruitful-
ness. Then there are worlds which are bleak and barren
and bitter, worlds which grind life like grain. Even with
body modifications and with worldchange machines,
there are only a few hundred worlds which may be in-
habited by the six intelligent races. Life is needed badly
on the worst of these. It can be a deadly blessing on the
best. When I say that life is needed or not needed in
certain places, I am, of course, also saying that death is
needed or not needed. I am not speaking or two
different things, but of the same thing. Osiris and I are
book-keepers. We credit and we debit. We raise waves,
or we cause waves to sink back again into the ocean.
Can life be counted upon to limit itself? No. It is the
mindless striving of two to become infinity. Can death
be counted upon to limit itself? Never. It is the equally
mindless effort of zero to encompass infinity.

“But there must be life control and death control,” he
says, “else the fruitful worlds would rise and fall, rise
and fall, cycling between empire and anarchy, then
down to final disruption. The bleak worlds would be
encompassed by zero. Life cannot contain itself within
the bounds statistics have laid down for its guidance.
Therefore, it must be contained, and it is. Osiris and I
hold the Middle Worlds. They lie within our field of
control, and we turn them on and we turn them off as
we would. Do you see now, Wakim? Do you begin to

understand?”

“You limit life? You cause death?”

“We can lay sterility on any or all of the six races on
any world we choose, for as long a period of time as is
necessary. This can be done on an absolute or a frac-
tional basis. We may also manipulate lifespans, deci-
mate populations.”

“How?”

“Fire. Famine. Plague. War.”

“What of the sterile worlds, the dry worlds? What of
these?”

“Multiple births can be insured, and we do not
tamper with lifespans. The newly dead are sent to the
House of Life, not here. There they are repaired, or
their parts used in the construction of new individuals
who may or may not host a human mentality.”

“And of the other dead?”

“The House of the Dead is the graveyard of the six
races. There are no lawful cemeteries in the Middle
Worlds. There have been times when the House of Life
has called upon us for hosts and for parts. There have
been other occasions when they have shipped us their
excess.”

“It is difficult to understand. It seems brutal, it seems
harsh. . . .”

“It is life and it is death. It is the greatest blessing and
the greatest curse in the universe. You do not have to
understand it, Wakim. Your comprehension or your
lack of it, your approval or your disapproval, will in no
way alter its operation.”

“And whence come you, Anubis — and Osiris — that
you control it?”

“There are some things that are not for you to know.”
“And how do the Middle Worlds accept your
control?”

“They live with it, and they die with it. It is above
their objections, for it is necessary for their continued
existence. It is become a natural law, and it is utterly
impartial, applying with equal force to all who come
beneath it.”

“There are some who do not?”

“You shall learn more of this when I am ready to
tell you, which is not now. I have made you a machine,
Wakim. Now I shall make you a man. Who is to say
how you started, where you started? Were I to wipe out
your memories up to this moment and then re-embody
you, you would recollect that you had begun as metal.”
“Will you do this thing?”

“No. I want you equipped with the memories which
you now possess, when and if I assign you to your new
duties.”

Then Anubis raises his hands and strikes them to-
gether.

A machine removes Wakim from the shelf and
switches off his senses as it lowers him. The music
pulses and falls about the dancers, the two hundred
torches blaze upon the pillars like immortal thoughts,
Anubis stares at a blackened place upon the floor of the

Page 56

great Hall, and overhead the canopy of smokes moves
to its own rhythms.

YV7akim opens his eyes and looks upon greyness. He
” lies on his back, staring upward. The tiles are cold
beneath him, and there is a flickering of light off to his
right. Suddenly, he clenches his left hand, feels for his
thumb, finds it, sighs.

“Yes,” says Anubis.

He sits up before the throne, looks down upon him-
self, looks up at Anubis.

“You have been baptized, you have been born again
into the flesh.”

“Thank you.”

“No trouble. Plenty of raw materials around here.
Stand up! Do you remember your lessons?”

Wakim stands.

“Which ones?”

“Temporal fugue. To make time follow the mind,
not the body.”

“Yes.”

“And killing?”

“Yes.”

“And combining the two?”

“Yes.”

Anubis stands, a full head taller than Wakim, whose
new body is well over two yards in length.

“Then show me!”

“Let the music cease!” he cries. “Let the one who in
life was called Dargoth come before me!”

The dead stop dancing. They stand without moving
and their eyes never blink. There is silence for several
seconds, unbroken by word, footfall, breathing.

Then Dargoth moves along the standing dead, ad-
vancing through shadow, through torchlight. Wakim
stands straighter when he sees him, for the muscles of
his back, his shoulders, his stomach tighten.

A metal band the colour of copper crosses Dargoth’s
head, covers his cheekbones, vanishes beneath his grey-
grizzled chin. A latitudinal band passes above his brows,
over his temples, meets at the back of his skull. His eyes
are wide, the sclera yellow and the iris red. His lower
jaw makes a constant chewing motion as he rolls for-
ward, and his teeth are long shadows. His head sways
from side to side upon its twenty inches of neck. His
shoulders are three feet in width, giving him the appear-
ance of an inverted triangle, for his sides taper sharply
to meet with his segmented chassis, which begins where
the flesh stops. His wheels turn slowly, the left rear one
squeaking with each revolution. His arms hang a full
four and a half feet, so that his fingertips barely brush
the floor. Four short, sharp metal legs are folded up-
ward along his fat sides. The razors come erect on his
back, fall again, as he moves. The eight-foot whip that
is his tail uncoils behind him as he comes to a halt
before the throne.

“For this night, this Thousandyear Night,” says
Anubis, “I give you back your name — Dargoth. Once

you were numbered among the mightiest warriors in the
Middle Worlds, Dargoth, until you pitted your strength
against that of an immortal and went down to your
death before him. Your broken body has been repaired,
and this night you must use it to do battle once more.
Destroy this man Wakim in single combat and you may
take his place as my first servant here in the House of
the Dead.”

dargoth crosses his great hands upon his brow and
bows until they touch the floor.

“You may have ten seconds,” says Anubis to Wakim,
“to prepare your mind for battle. Stand ready, Dar-
goth!”

“Lord,” says Wakim, “how may I kill one who is
already dead?”

“That is your problem,” says Anubis. “You have now
wasted all ten of your seconds with foolish questions.
Begin!”

There comes a snapping sound and a series of metal-
lic clicks.

Dargoth rises on to his hind legs, so that now his head
raise him three feet higher above the floor. He prances.
He raises his arms and flexes them.

Wakim watches, waiting.

Dargoth rises on to his hind legs, so that now his head
is ten feet above the floor.

Then he leaps forward, his arms outstretched, his tail
curled, his head extended, fangs bared. The blades rise
upon his back like gleaming fins, his hooves fall like
hammers.

At the last possible moment, Wakim sidesteps and
throws a punch which is blocked by the other’s fore-
arm. He leaps high into the air then, and the whip
cracks harmlessly beneath him.

For all his bulk, Dargoth halts and turns rapidly. He
rears once more and strikes forward with his front
hooves. Wakim avoids them, but Dargoth’s hands fall
upon his shoulders as he descends.

Wakim seizes both wrists and kicks Dargoth in the
chest. The tail-lash falls across his right cheek as he
does so. Then he breaks the grip of those massive hands
upon his shoulders, ducks his head and lays the edge of
his left hand hard upon the other’s side. The whip falls
again, this time across his back. He aims a blow at the
other’s head, but the long neck twists it out of the way,
and he hears the whip crack once more, missing him by
inches.

Dargoth’s fist lands upon his cheekbone, and he
stumbles, off-balance, sliding upon the floor. He rolls
out of the path of the hooves, but a fist knocks him
sprawling as he attempts to rise again.

As the next blow descends, however, he catches the
wrist with both hands and throws his full weight upon
the arm, twisting his head to the side. Dargoth’s fist
strikes the floor and Wakim regains his feet, landing a
left cross as he does so.

Dargoth’s head rolls with the punch and the lash

Page 57

cracks beside Wakim’s ear. He lays another blow upon
the twisting head, and then he is borne over backwards
as Dargoth’s rear legs straighten like springs and his
shoulder strikes him in the chest.

He rears, once more.

Then, for the first time, Dargoth speaks:

“Now, Wakim, now!” he says. “Dargoth becomes first
servant of Anubis!”

as the hooves flash downward, Wakim catches those
metal legs, one in each hand, halfway up their length.
He has braced himself in a crouched position, and now
his lips curl back, showing his clenched teeth, as Dar-
goth is frozen in mid-strike above him.

He laughs as he springs back into a standing position
and heaves with both arms, casting his opponent high
up upon his hind legs, struggling to keep from falling
over backwards.

“Fool!” he says, and his voice is strangely altered.
His word, like the stroke of a great iron bell, rings
through the Hall. There comes up a soft moaning from
the dead, as when they had been routed from out their
graves.

“ ‘Now’? you say? ‘Wakim’? you say?” and he
laughs as he steps forward beneath the falling hooves.

“You know not what to say!” and he locks his arms
about the great metal torso and the hooves flail helpless-
ly above his back and the tail-whip swishes and cracks
and lays stripes upon his shoulders.

His hands rest between the sharpened spines, and he
crushes the unyielding segmented body of metal close
up against his own.

Dargoth’s great hands find his neck, but the thumbs
cannot reach his throat, and the muscles of Wakim’s
neck tighten and cord as he bends his knees and strains.

They stand so, frozen for a timeless instant, and the
firelight wrestles with shadows upon their bodies.

Then with a gigantic, heaving motion, Wakim raises
Dargoth above the ground, turns and hurls him from
him.

Dargoth’s legs kick widly as he turns over in the air.
His spines rise and fall and his tail reaches out and
cracks. He raises his arms up before his face, but he
lands with a shattering crash at the foot of the throne
of Anubis, and there he lies still, his metal body broken
in four places and his head split open upon the first step
to the throne.

Wakim turns toward Anubis.

“Sufficient?” he inquires.

“You did not employ temporal fugue,” says Anubis,
not even looking downward at the wreck that had been
Dargoth.

“It was unnecessary. He was not that mighty an
opponent.”

“He was mighty,” says Anubis. “Why did you laugh,
and make as if you questioned your name when you
fought with him?”

“I do not know. For a moment, when I realised that

I could not be beaten, I felt as though I were someone
else.”

“Someone without fear, pity, or remorse?”

“Yes.”

“Do you still feel thus?”

“No.”

“Then why have you stopped calling me ‘Master’?”
“The heat of battle raised emotions which over-rode
my sense of protocol.”

“Then correct the oversight, immediately.”

“Very well, Master.”

“Apologise. Beg my pardon, most humbly.”

Wakim prostrates himself on the floor.

“I beg your pardon, Master. Most humbly.”

“Rise again, and consider yourself pardoned. The
contents of your previous stomach have gone the way
of all such things. You may go re-refresh yourself now.
Let there be singing and dancing once more! Let there
be drinking and laughter in celebration of the name-
giving on this, Wakim’s Thousandyear Eve! Let the
carcass of Dargoth be gone from my sight!”

And these things are done.

when wakim has finished his meal, and it seems as if
the dancing and the singing of the dead will continue
until Time’s well-deserved end, Anubis gestures, first to
his left, then to his right, and every other flame folds
upon every other pillar, dives within itself, is gone. His
mouth opens and the words come down upon Wakim,
“Take them back. Fetch me my staff.”

Wakim stands and gives the necessary orders. Then
he leads the dead out from the great Hall. As they
depart, the tables vanish between the pillars. An im-
possible breeze tears at the ceiling of smoke. Before
that great, grey mat is shredded, however, the other
torches have died, and the only illumination within the
Hall comes from the two blazing bowls on either side
of the throne.

Anubis stares into the darkness, and the captured
light rays reform themselves at his bidding and he sees
Dargoth fall once more at the foot of his throne and
lie still, and he sees the one he has named Wakim stand-
ing with a skull’s grin upon his lips, and for an instant
— had it been a trick of the flamelight? — a mark upon
his brow.

Far, in an enormous room where the light is dim and
orange and crowded into corners and the dead lay them
down once more upon invisible catafalques above their
opened graves, faint, rising, then falling, Wakim hears a
sound that is not like any sound he has ever heard
before. He stays his hand upon the staff and descends
the dais.

“Old man,” he says, to one with whom he had spoken
earlier, one whose hair and whose beard are stained
with wine and in whose left wrist a clock has stopped,
“old man, hear my words and tell me if you know: what
is that sound?”

The unblinking eyes stare upward, past his own, and

Page 58

the lips move.

“Master . .

“I am not Master here.”

“. . . Master, it is but the howling of a dog.”

Wakim returns then to the dais and gives them all
back to their graves.

Then the light departs and the staff guides him
through the dark, along the path that has been ordained.

T have brought your staff, Master.”

“Arise, and approach.”

“The dead are all returned to their proper places.”
“Very good. Wakim, you are my man?”

“Yes, Master.”

“To do my bidding, and to serve me in all things?”
“Yes, Master.”

“This is why you are my emissary to the Middle
Worlds, and beyond.”

“I am to depart the House of the Dead?”

“Yes, I am sending you forth from here on a mis-
sion.”

“What sort of mission?”

“The story is long, involved. There are many persons
in the Middle Worlds who are very old. You know
this?”

“Yes.”

“And there are some who are timeless and deathless.”
“Deathless, Lord?”

“By one means or another, certain individuals have
achieved a kind of immortality. Perhaps they follow
the currents of life and draw upon their force, and they
flee from the waves of death. Perhaps they have adjus-
ted their biochemistry, or they keep their bodies
in constant repair, or they have many bodies and ex-
change them, or steal new ones. Perhaps they wear
metal bodies, or no bodies at all. Whatever the means
involved, you will hear talk of the Three Hundred
Immortals when you enter the Middle Worlds. This is
only an approximate figure, for few truly know much
about them. There are two hundred eighty-three im-
mortals, to be exact. They cheat on life, on death, as
you can see, and their very existence upsets the balance,
inspires others to strive to emulate their legends, causes
others to think them gods. Some are harmless wan-
derers, others are not. All are powerful and subtle, all
adept at continuing their existence. One is especially
noxious, and I am sending you to destroy him.”

“Who may he be. Master.”

“He is called the Prince Who Was A Thousand, and
dwells beyond the Middle Worlds. His kingdom lies
beyond the realm of life and death, in a place where it

is always twilight. He is difficult to locate, however, for
he often departs his own region and trespasses into the
Middle Worlds and elsewhere. I desire that he come to
an end, as he has opposed both the House of the Dead
and the House of Life for many days.”

“What does he look like, the Prince Who Was A
Thousand?”

“Anything he wishes.”

“Where shall I find him?”

“I do not know. You must seek him.”

“How shall I know him?”

“By his deeds, by his words. He opposes us in all
ways.”

“Surely others must oppose you also. . . .”

“Destroy all you come upon who do so. You shall
know the Prince Who Was A Thousand, however, be-
cause he shall be the most difficult of all to destroy. He
will come closest to destroying you.”

“Supposing he succeeds?”

“Then I shall take me a thousand years more to train
another emissary to set upon this task. I do not desire
his downfall today or tomorrow. It will doubtless take
you centuries even to locate him. Time matters little. An
age will pass before he becomes a threat, to Osiris or
myself. You will learn of him as you travel, seeking
after him. When you find him you will know him.”
“Am I mighty enough to work his undoing?”

“I think you are.”

“I am ready.”

“Then I shall set your feet upon the track. I give you
the power to invoke me, in my name, and in times of
need to draw force from the field of Life and of Death
while you are among the Middle Worlds. This will make
you invincible. You will report back to me when you
feel you need to. If I feel this need, I will reach out
after you.”

“Thank you. Master.”

“You will obey all my sendings, instantly.”

“Yes.”

“Go now and rest. After you have slept and eaten
again, you will depart and begin your mission.”

“Thank you.”

“This will be your second last sleep within this
House, Wakim. Meditate upon the mysteries it con-
tains.”

“I do so constantly.”

“I am one of them.”

“Master. . . .”

“That is part of my name. Never forget it.”

“Master — how could I?”

(This story is the first in a series.)

Page 59

*The Decision to Drop the Bomb.
By Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed.
(Methuen, 50s).

photograph: the Big Three at the
1945 Potsdam Conference. There is
Generalissimo Stalin, then known
to and loved by the British public
as “Uncle Joe”, with President
Harry Truman, who had so recently
taken over from Roosevelt, and
Prime Minister Churchill, clutching
his customary cigar. These leaders,
whatever else they had done, had
concluded the war against Hitler.
The terrible facts about Hitler’s ex-
termination of the European Jews
had recently come to light and were
being digested, as far as that was
possible. In two bombing raids on
Dresden, 25,000 people had been
killed and more injured; 83,000
people had been killed in Tokyo
during one fire raid; over 1,000 V-
rockets had fallen on Britain; the
Russians had lost an estimated
twenty million military and civilian
people dead.

It was against such megalomaniac
facts that the decision was taken to
drop the bomb. It was a way of
ending the war quickly, the easy
way; the alternative was to inflict
more fire raids on Japan and to
launch a full scale invasion, when
the death toll on both sides would
have mounted enormously. And
there was another consideration; at
any moment, Russia would enter
the war against Japan.

In May, 1945, Churchill had first
used that drab phrase, “the Iron
Curtain”, which we were to grow
to love so well. The multitudes who

Books and Comment

The Hiroshima Man

by Brian W. Aldiss

J ust after the midnight of
August 5th, 1945, on a small
atoll in the Pacific called Tinian, a
chaplain offered up a brief prayer
for airmen about to fly on a danger-
ous mission. “May the men who fly
this night be kept safe in Thy care
and may they be returned safely to
us. . . .”

The men concerned went off to a
midnight breakfast consisting of
eggs, sausage, and good American
coffee. An hour later, a B-29,
“Straight Flush”, a weather plane
piloted by Captain Claude Eatherly,
took off. Within an hour and a half,
it was followed by “Enola Gay”.
Both planes headed towards the
Japanese city of Hiroshima. In the
belly of the “Enola Gay” lay the
atomic bomb affectionately chris-
tened “Little Boy”.

It is, of course, a cliche — and
none the less true for that — to say
that the atomic age was bom with
the dropping of that bomb. It was
a very difficult birth, just as its later
years have been difficult and com-
plex enough, full of enough ambi-
guities, to satisfy even a science
fiction writer. The story of the birth
of our age is related, concisely and
impartially, in an American book*
just published in this country.

This is a popular book, not lit-
tered with footnotes. It earns its
place on a crowded shelf by virtue
of being a model of clear reporting
on the steps, mainly political, which
led to the dropping of the bomb.

The ill winds of the century,
scientific, economic, psychological,
national and political, seem to whirl
over Hiroshima, making it the eye
of the storm for a moment, before
they blow outwards again in new
and more ominous patterns. The
dropping of the bomb, the last mili-
tary act of World War Two, was
the first political act of the Cold
War aimed as much against the
Soviets as against Japan. Since then,
we have had to accommodate our-
selves to a world of political acts
in which people can easily become
non-persons.

J uxtaposed in the book with a
picture of the “Enola Gay” re-
turning from its mission is a key

Page 60

had survived the war had reluc-
tantly to turn and face the spectre
Churchill had seen long ago — per-
haps when he delayed the Second
Front — and realise that good old
Uncle Joe was a figure more terrify-
ing and more secure in evil than
Hitler, as well as being the world’s
richest poor man, the apotheosis of
Communism : he had no income be-
cause he owned all Russia. Stalin
was the new improved - model
bogeyman.

I N Washington, a belated realisa-
tion that Russian Communism
was more to be feared than British
imperialism resulted in some nifty
footwork. The testing of the atomic
device had to be hurried forward.
Pressure had been brought to bear
on Stalin to enter the war in the
Far East; now that pressure was
relaxed. The idea of the Russian
armies poised on the Manchurian
border became hideous, the thought
of Russian and American zones of
occupation in Tokyo unbearable.
Besides, the Russians wished to do
away with the Emperor; the Ameri-
cans saw that he represented
stability in Japan. Without the
Emperor, Japan might relapse into
chaos — which of course would en-
courage Russian adventuring in the
Pacific zone. So lenient American
policies must prevail. The war had
to be finished, but fast. What made
it a little bit awkward was that by
June, the Japanese were putting out
peace feelers through the Russians.

So, who did decide to drop the
bomb? The traditional and correct
answer is, of course, Harry Truman.
But, as the authors of this book
observe, a positive decision was
scarcely needed.

A shade of doubt remains as to
whether a clear-cut formal decision
was ever given. The decision to use
the bomb was implicit in the initial
undertaking to make the bomb. It
had to be made, the argument goes,
in case Hitler made one. The Man-
hattan Project and its allied projects
got under way, following Einstein’s
suggestion to President Roosevelt
that a thermo-nuclear bomb would
work. Later, many of the physicists
and chemists involved had qualms
of conscience and protested; but the
impetus of events proved too strong
for them; there was two billion
dollars of tax-payers’ money on the
ball and it was rolling too fast. And
so the bomb designed to be used

against Germany was dropped on
Japan as a warning to Soviet
Russia.

P 3R all that, there was con-
scientious debate on the ques-
tion of using the bomb; one cannot
exactly charge such men as Secre-
tary of War Stimpson or the
cautious Secretary of State Byrnes
with indifference; but it seems to
me personally that they were no
longer as much in command of
events as we might suppose, be-
cause the world and its events had
become too complex.

Japan could have been warned
that the new weapon would be used
if she did not immediately surren-
der. But that surrender might not
have been forthcoming since, even
after the two bombs had fallen on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was
still a division of opinion within the
Japanese government as to whether
they should fight on to the death.

And, in sober fact, perhaps it is
only because we have been con-
fronted with the effects of those two
acts of destruction that no more
bombs have been dropped in anger
in the succeeding twenty-two ran-
corous years. Whether as catharsis
or trauma-inducer, the effect of that
filthy hot cloud boiling up over
Hiroshima with whole buildings
sailing in it has been lasting.

One of the Americans who was
uncomfortably near to the scene of
the crime was the Captain, later
Major, Claude Eatherly, who
piloted the weather plane “Straight
Flush”. It was he who reported that
cloud conditions over Hiroshima
were satisfactory, thus sealing the
fate of the city.

E atherly has since become some-
thing of a legend, which is re-
examined in another new book*.
Nobody could pretend that this
rather curiously written volume
offers anything like the lucid
reasoning which is a feature of The
Decision to Drop the Bomb —
which, incidentally, mentions,
Eatherly once in passing — but it is
equally interesting and shows
another face of twentieth century

*Dark Star. Hiroshima Recon-
sidered in the Life of Claude
Eatherly. By Ronnie Dugger (Victor
Gollancz, 38s).

sickness.

When the “Straight Flush” had
made its report, it turned around for
home. The highly trained crew de-
bated whether they would stay to
see the special new bomb dropped
but decided not to wait, as other-
wise they would miss the afternoon
poker game back on Tinian.
Eatherly was a tough young Texan
of twenty-seven, devoted to gam-
bling and drink and women, with
perhaps the occasional quieter mo-
ment when he would look at a
comic book. In short, his were the
interests of men on active duty
everywhere.

His buddies called him Buck. His
patriotism was beyond question.
None of his friends or crew mem-
bers recalls his saying anything “in
the slightest degree philosophical,
profound, or even serious”. He was
full of horseplay, a swashbuckler,
and was disappointed that his boys
never got to drop a bomb on Japan
themselves. Japan caved in before
that happened.

After the war, swashbuckling was
out of fashion. Buck’s mother died,
he got into trouble with the Air
Force and had to leave. Like a
Battle of Britain hero, he found it
hard to settle in Civvy Street, and
was soon involved in some shady
business of arms-running to Cuba.
He was lucky not to be arrested.

He drifted into minor jobs, work-
ing in a Texaco service station.
There was a scare because his wife
had a miscarriage; when doctors
examined him, they found he had
a defective sperm count. It might
have been caused by his flight
through an atomic cloud, when he
acted as an observer at Bikini. But
nothing definite emerged.

So what brought what Dugger
quaintly calls “the first hard tug on
Eatherly’s soul from the demiurge
of atomic warfare”? It seems —
again, things are none too definite
— that he began to have nightmares
in 1947 or 1948. He was drinking
and gambling a lot. He started
passing dud cheques. In February,
1950, he tried to commit suicide,
and returned to life to find himself
in a veterans’ mental hospital.

Discharged from there, his charac-
ter, on Dugger’s evidence, deterior-
ated. He drank more, passed more
dud cheques, tried to commit suicide
again. Hiroshima was scarcely men-
tioned; the legend was merely ges-

Page 61

tating amid the litter of the Cold
War.

W hen eatherly was in jail in
1954, charged with forgery and
theft, he wrote to an attorney called
Joseph Gowan, who, says Dugger,
“believes in the power of prayer, in
Unity, a religion he says is similar
to Christian Science, and in Scien-
tology”; Scientology is also known
to the science fiction fraternity as
Dianetics.

Gowan went to see Eatherly and,
in Gowan’s reported words, “I
brought out the psychiatric gim-
mick, which is true, that he felt
like he ought to be punished ... I
occasionally suggested to him, as a
sort of word to the wise, that it
would be foolish to go on hurting
himself out of a subconscious idea
that he was responsible for Hiro-
shima . . .”

The tumblers of the lock were
turning. Guilt, disappointment, hope,
frustration all took their turn; Scien-
tology and the menacing backwash
of the thoughts of Hitler, Hirohito,
Churchill, Stalin and Truman all
swilled together above Eatherly’s
head. From now on, Eatherly and
his story were to be increasingly in
the public domain, less an actual
person than a case, a problem, a
myth, as the four magi figures of
our culture — publicists, politicians,
psychiatrists and preachers — took
over.

While the legend of the guilt-laden
Hiroshima pilot grew, Eatherly him-
self, after another spell of tran-
quillizers and shock treatment be-
came a small-time hold-up man,
stealing petty cash in the little dried-
up towns of the southern states. At
one grocery store, he did the hold-up
with a gun that was broken and un-
loaded; Dugger emphasises the
point as if it were important. “He
was nice,” said the store-owner.
Early in 1957, the Veterans’ Associ-
ation rating board, in Dugger’s pic-
turesque phrase, “escalated his men-
tal disability rating to 100 per cent”,
and boosted his pension. A couple
of weeks after that, Eatherly was
clapped into jail in Fort Worth.

M eanwhile, the Eatherly story
was growing larger and even
more inaccurate than life, as news-
hounds all round the world took it
up. There is no reason to believe
that Eatherly himself was not as

impressed as any one by the stories.
Maybe Newsweek was right; may-
be he did have the D.F.C.; maybe
he had flown over Nagasaki. We
believe what we want to believe, and
what we want to believe is generally
the best story. Even the logician,
Bertrand Russell, wrote that
Eatherly dropped the bomb on
Hiroshima. We all holiday in our
own imaginations.

The Christians, as represented by
the Fellowship of Reconciliation,
got to Eatherly. The Catholic com-
monwealth said, “Mr. Eatherly, it
seems clear, has taken on his
shoulders guilt a whole nation
would find hard to bear”, while
Christian century asked, “How
will the psychiatrists deal with a
man whose tragedy is the tragedy
of a whole generation of Ameri-
cans?” John Wain wrote an
Eatherly poem which was published
in the listener; George Barker
also wrote one; his was published
in the new statesman (Dugger is
sound on such details).

Inevitably, perhaps, Eatherly be-
gan to write letters to all and sundry
from his cell. He wrote to a Japan-
ese newspaper saying, among other
things, that he also was a victim of
Hiroshima. If this is true, and if it
is also true that he bears his nation’s
guilt, this leads to an uncomfortable
train of thought. Eatherly lives to-
day the same sort of life he always
did, in the sweaty Gulf port of Gal-
veston; his nation and its chief com-
petitor, Russia, perform huge old-
fashioned activities like shooting
dogs and monkeys and astronauts
and cosmonauts beyond the atmo-
sphere in modernised and glam-
orised versions of Hitler’s V-
weapons, while the truly modern
nation is the one that received the
baptism of atomic fire: Japan,

which showers the world with a
glittering fallout of superb toys—
from chronometers and printed-
circuit TV sets to slicker land-
rovers, racing cars, and oil tankers — -
not to mention the deadliest forms
of unarmed combat and the most
hard-core SF films.

T he Germans also became in-
volved in the Eatherly business.
Gunther Anders, who knew the
States well and was living in Vienna,
began to write to Eatherly. Their
exchange of letters was published
as a book entitled Burning Con-

science, with a preface by Bertrand
Russell. Eatherly was taken up by
the unilateral disarmers, while the
American authorities seem to have
been notably unauthoritarian; in
this country, he would at least have
been interviewed by the government-
impersonating Robin Day, and he
would have been chaired to Alder-
maston. The editor of the new york
post said, “one almost gets the im-
pression that somewhere in Wash-
ington there has been a decision to
treat him as a ‘non-person’ . . .”

We all have myths about our-
selves; eventually, it may be only
that which distinguishes us from an-
droid robots. Eichmann, whose
spirit is invoked in Dugger’s book,
believed himself to be “a man of
average character”; that was his
myth. Eatherly’s navigator, Gren-
nan, said of Eatherly, “He was the
Hollywood conception of a pilot . . .
He unconsciously tried to live up to
that image”; so that back in 1945
Eatherly was already striving to-
wards non-personality.

And today? Dugger obviously
liked the subject of his book per-
sonally; one feels perhaps that he
would prefer to be a debunker, but
the bunking forces of the present are
too strong for him, and in the end
he gives us a romantic portrait of
Eatherly today, as almost another
Hollywood figure; “He whiled
away hours in the clubs of the dark
pastels, talking, dancing to the
melancholy songs, drinking, think-
ing. He likes cities because he gets
lost in their corners like these. This
is where he is, among drifters . . .
wedding-goers stopping for a drink
. . . tourists in beach clothes ... a
lonely fellow at the bar, staring at
the front door, his jaw lax.”

This is where he is . . . surrounded
by dislocated grammar and bits of
the myth of our age. Whether he
ever felt truly guilty or not is per-
haps not a question to ask; he was
a focus for the guilt of others. And
whether their guilts were strictly
what they believed them to be is
another unaskable question. Guilt is
the great romance of the 20th cen-
tury; it should not be more than a
decade before we get a musical
based on Eatherly’s life: “The
Hiroshima Man”. Meanwhile, per-
haps it is enough, and sad enough,
to say that he remains the most
spectacular victim of the atomic
bomb. Brian W. Aldiss.

Page 62

The Year’s Best S-F, llth Annual
Edition, edited by Judith Merril.
(Delacorte Press, New York,
$4.95.)

J UDITH MERRIL, anthologist extra-
ordinary, once again gathering
her ingredients (eye of Ballard, toe
of Clarke), weighing and balancing,
stirring and spooning, muttering in-
cantations in italic type, producing
a steaming and heady 36-piece brew,
infusions of which are guaranteed to
enlighten, exhilarate and electrify.

And, for the same price, she in-
cludes a free, handy, catch-all
definition of the sub-genre (with
snap-fasteners). Viz: . a collec-

tion of imaginative, speculative
writing reflecting . . . clearly and
sharply the problems and conflicts
of civilised man today, and his
hopes and apprehensions for the
future.”

She intends this statement as a
description of the book, but implies
its value as a blanket to cover the
field. I humbly submit at this point
that her blanket provides warmth
and shelter for everything going by
the name of “fiction”; that the term
“science fiction” has passed irretriev-
ably into the popular idiom, what-
ever incompatibilities are contained
therein; and that the whole effort to
rename the stuff is a waste of good
introduction space.

The book is the usual Merril
menu of balance, variety, and con-
sistently high nutrition from dish to
dish. You can’t really read this
(killing the metaphor) as a book,
however, the editor tries to build
transitions with her story introduc-
tions. You must read it as a collec-
tion, one story, a pause, another, a
longer pause, and so on. Otherwise
you’re the man trying to appreciate
the structure of snowflakes in a
blizzard.

SF patriots over here will admire
the heavy influx of Britons into the
anthology. Ballard, of course, and
Aldiss; Tubb and Roald Dahl; but
also less-known names — Alistair
Bevan, Johnny Byrne, the fashion-
able poets Redgrove and MacBeth,
and more. Outside The Best of New
Worlds, Miss Merril’s selection gives
just about the best available taste
of the British “New Light” in SF.

But then, of course, that’s what
the title says. The Year’s Best. And
what I like about Judith Merril’s
anthologies (aside from the fascinat-

ing bits of “in” gossip in the pre-
ambles) is the obvious conscien-
tiousness they exhibit. Anyone
might gather thirty-odd good stories,
call them the best, and let the mob
argue about it. Miss Merril’s hard
work obviously goes on consider-
ably longer. We know she has sifted
and triple-sifted; we know she has
scoured the most unlikely byways
for a rich titbit; we know that an
enormous quantity of excellent writ-
ing has been left out, necessarily,
and this fact reassures us about the
worth of the anthology and the
strength of today’s SF.

In the end, these stories give us
their own individual and admirable
qualities, but also give us a glimpse
of new developments in the field
(fringe activities, innovations, trends
and fashions). What’s more, the
annual anthologies altogether con-
tain a portrait of the decade’s best
SF — a portrait drawn with almost
magical skill by the editor’s know-
ledge, insight and intuition.

What more can I say? Except that
I’d rather have a Judith Merril an-
thology than just about any other
anthology going.

(Miss Merril’s annuals have al-
ways been badly represented over
here — only a few published, and
then straight into paperback. But I
understand that this situation is soon
to be rectified.)

Douglas Hill.

A t one point in The Einstein
Intersection (Ace Books, 40
cents) the narrator learns that his
world is the result of the interaction
of two universes, as an alien con-
tinuum intersects that of humanity.
It could well be a description of the
private universe of Samuel R.
Delany as it impinges upon that of
his readers. The outcome is a dream-
like Earth where ancient myths —
labyrinth and Minotaur, Billy the
Kid, pop music idols — sprout anew
in strangely altered forms. Lobey,
the ugly Orpheus of this future age
armed with a machete-flute, leaves
his native village in search of the
killer of Friza, his Eurydice. Join-
ing a group of dragon-herders, he
follows a trail of revelation and dis-
covery, encountering the sinister
young-old redhead. Kid Death, the
voiceless Green-eye, the four-armed
Spider, bizarre in shape and powers,
moving against a background of
beauty and horror.

Paralleling his course runs that of
the author as he journeys across
Europe; as he absorbs a scene here,
a character there, the story of Lobey
evolves. The technique ought to
wreck all possibility of suspension
of disbelief, yet instead Lobey’s
world blazes with life; only the
richness of Delany’s imagery tends
at times to clog the narrative and so
become self-defeating.

Scarcely less colourful is the
universe of Roger Zelazny as dis-
played in Four For Tomorrow (Ace
Books, 45 cents), which contains,
as might be expected, four stories.
First is ‘The Furies’, an overwritten
tale of interstellar crime and punish-
ment which offers no particular
justification for its title. Second is
‘The Graveyard Heart’, a bitter and
humorous picture of the Set, most
exclusive pack of all, who sleep in
cold storage down the centuries
while the mundane world grows old,
and awaken to brief periods of
revelry and, sometimes, involvement
with the passing parade of history.
Third is ‘The Doors of His Face,
the Lamps of His Mouth’, in which
Jean Luharich, glamorous owner of
a cosmetics firm, comes to Venus
and teams up — again — with an al-
coholic hunter in pursuit of a
stupendous sea-beast. Long before
the chase is over, the roles of angler,
bait and quarry have become inter-
changeable. Fourth is ‘A Rose for
Ecclesiastes’, where an egotistical
poet meets a daughter of the ancient
culture of Mars in an outstanding
treatment of the theme of inter-
planetary romance. Theodore Stur-
geon contributes the sort of intro-
duction up to which no author
should have to live.

If the prose-style of the above
writers verges upon the fluorescent.
The Man in the High Castle (Pen-
guin SF, 5s.) by Philip K. Dick,
offers by contrast a clear, cold day-
light. For many who lived through
the years from 1939 to 1945, the
prospect of a Nazi victory is still an
undead nightmare, and Dick depicts
it in chilling detail. Tracing the
interlocking fortunes of a handful of
people in the Japanese-occupied
sector of North America, the narra-
tive builds up an alternate future/
past as convincing as the world we
know. Europe and Africa are testing
grounds for the perverted science of
the Third Reich; the outer planets
are destined to be Aryan colonies;

Page 63

in the USA, Japanese rule has been
recognised as the lesser of two evils.
Among the items of the conqueror’s
culture which filter down to the con-
quered is the / Chitig, the millenia-
old text which the Japanese them-
selves adopted from China, and
which will, when correctly consulted
(and interpreted), predict the future.
How the I Ching affects the destinies
of Dick’s characters, and how it is
connected with the subversive best-
seller, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,
which describes a world where the
Allies were victorious, makes a story
of fascinating complexity. For any-
one seeking further examples of the
work of Philip K. Dick, John Brun-
ner’s highly informative article in
new worlds 166 will be an inval-
uable guide.

Two more titles in the Gollancz
SF series. The Revolving Boy and
The Wonder Effect, both at 18s.,
offer respectively the work of a
comparative newcomer, Gertrude
Friedberg, and the collaboration of
old hands Pohl and Kornbluth.
The nine stories making up the
latter book span 22 years, beginning
with 1940’s Trouble in Time’. In an
introduction, Frederick Pohl de-
clares that at least 25 of the short
stories which the team wrote deserve
to remain buried. Readers of this
collection may consider him con-
servative. To exhume early material
such as ‘Marstube’ and ‘Best
Friend’, which can scarcely have
been notable examples of the genre
even in their period, can only detract
from the reputation founded upon
The Space Merchants, Gladiator-at-
Law and other products of the
matured Pohl-Kornbluth style. Re-
deeming the book to some extent
are ‘The Engineer’, wherein the
manager of an undersea oil project
tries to be a cool Canute; ‘Night-
mare With Zeppelins’, a Wells-
World War One pastiche; and ‘The
Quaker Cannon’, concerning brain-
washing, counter-intelligence and
betrayal, which is only marginally
science-fiction but by far the most
satisfying story of the nine.

Although the descriptions of
futuristic household gadgets tend to
be obtrusive, Gertrude Friedberg
demonstrates convincingly in her
first science-fiction novel, The Re-
volving Boy, that deep space and
domesticity are far from being in-
compatible. Set in the 1970’s, when
manned spaceflight has been aban-

doned because of radiation hazards,
the novel follows the trials of Derv
Nagy, whose compulsion to revolve
draws the attention of all about him,
an attention which his parents, for
reasons of their own, desperately
wish to avoid. But by degrees the
strange history of Nagy’s birth and
his inexplicable orientation toward
a certain point in the heavens, in-
volve him with an almost forgotten
branch of Project Ozma, the search
for other intelligences in the uni-
verse. There may be little in The
Revolving Boy for the hard-core SF
reader, but it should appeal to a
public which is becoming increas-
ingly aware of the field.

Veteran fantasy writer Robert
Bloch, who seems finally to have
thrown off the “author of Psycho”
tag, pops up again with Pleasant
Dreams) Nightmares (Whiting &
Wheaton, 21s.). The 15 stories in
this collection first appeared be-
tween 1947 and 1958, and the style
is occasionally faintly dated. Bloch’s
talent for horror, however, is here in
full strength, reinforced by a
macabre sense of humour, and tales
such as ‘That Hell-Bound Train’,
‘Sweet Sixteen’ or ‘The Sleeping
Beauty’, are eminently worth a
second run for your money.

J. Cawthorn.

The Authors

Thomas M. Disch is a young American
living in Europe. His poetry and short
stories have appeared in most of the
leading sf magazines, transatlantic
review, playboy, etc. and he has pub-
lished three novels, the first of which.
The Genocides (Whiting and Wheaton)
recently appeared in the U.K. 101 11-
Bombs and Other Stories was published
last year by Compact Books.

J. G. Ballard is the author of the trilogy
The Drowned World, The Drought and
The Crystal World (Cape) and of several
short story collections, including The
Disaster Area (Cape). His short fiction
has appeared most recently in argosy,

NEW WORLDS, ENCOUNTER and PLAYBOY.

David I. Masson was born during the
First World War and is interested in

literary and linguistic studies. A collec-
tion of his stories will be published by
Faber and Faber later this year.

Roger Zelazny lives in Baltimore, is the
winner of a Hugo Award and a Nebula
Award (presented by The Science Fiction
Writers of America) for his two novels.
This Immortal and The Dream Master
(due to be published by Rupert Hart-
Davies). A number of his books are due
to be published in the U.K. within the
next year.

John T. Sladek is a native of Minnesota
and lives in London. He is the author of
a variety of short stories and poems,
several mysteries and a humorous sf
novel The Reproductive System. His
tour de force, Masterson and the
Clerks, is due to be published in new
worlds next month.

P. A. Zoline is a painter who has ex-
hibited at the Tate Gallery, the United
States Embassy (in the London Group),
and elsewhere. Born in Chicago, she now
lives in Camden Town. The Heat Death
of the Universe is her first story.

George MacBeth’s poetry has been pub-
lished widely and he is the author of
three collections of verse, The Broken
Places (Scorpion Press), The Doomsday
Book (Scorpion Press) and the recent
The Colour of Blood (Maomillan). A
children’s book. Noah's Journey, was
also published by Maomillan. As Talks
Producer for the BBC Third Programme,
his work has included the series Poetry
Now and the recent three-part pro-
gramme The New SF.

Dr. Christopher Evans is a psychologist
whose main area of research is human
vision and the design of pattern recogni-
tion machines. He is the author of over
twenty-five scientific papers.

Charles Platt is the author of a number
of short stories and a novel. The Gar-
bage World (to be published in the U.S.
by Berkley later this year). He has been
Design Editor of new worlds for
some time.

Brian W. Aldiss is Literary Editor of
the oxford mail, author of a number
of science fiction novels, including Non-
Stop (Faber), The Dark Light Years
(Faber) and Greybeard (Faber), a book
about life in a bookshop, The Bright-
fount Diaries (Faber), and a travel book
on Jugoslavia, Cities and Stones (Faber).

James Cawthorn is well known as an
sf illustrator, is the author of a number
of stories for children and a regular
book reviewer for new worlds.

Douglas Hill is a Canadian poet, a free-
lance editor and an anthologist. His
anthologies include Window on the
Future (Rupert Hart-Davies) and Way
of the Werewolf (Panther). With Pat
Williams he is the author of The Super-
natural (Aldus). A book on Canada will
be published later this, year by Heine-
mann and a new anthology. The Devil
His Due, is due' from Rupert Hart-
Davies shortly.

Printed by S. R. Verstage & Sons Ltd., Brunei Road, Houndmills Estate, Basingstoke and published by Magnelist Publications Ltd., London

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